What are you distributing?

A friend of mine was recently talking about the foods available at her local food bank. In every community, there is a food bank where people can receive food to sustain themselves and their family. However, at the same time, each of us in our own ways is a distribution center, a spiritual food bank of sorts. The question is what is on your shelves. We each have gifts, talents, skills, and the capacity to be kind and compassionate, however, where are they. Are they in your private stash for personal consumption or on the shelves of your spiritual distribution center?

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The Lens of Love

Whenever I go to the ophthalmologist’s office, they check my eyes to see how my vision is doing. While they are able to see behind my eye and assess all kinds of information about my vision, they are unable to assess how I see people. see there is more to our vision then just whether or not it is 20/20 or if we need corrective lenses or contacts to enable us to see better. When it comes to seeing others or ourselves the only lens we need to wear is a lens of love. How we see others and ourselves is about us and where we are at in our journeys. If we cannot see ourselves through a lens of love, then how can we see others through that lens? The lens of love is unconditional. Some refer to this as agape love, a love that transcends the ability to be frustrated. It cannot be frustrated because there is no expectation attached to it. When we see others and ourselves through this lens of unconditional love, it means we have released our expectations for others and ourselves. When we see ourselves getting frustrated with someone because they have not fulfilled my expectations, it is a signal that our love for them conditional.

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A & E

When I was in seminary, one of the things Dr Ricutti taught us in Intro to Preaching was to have a title that would catch people’s interest. My guess is when you saw the title you thought about the A & E television station (Arts and Entertainment). I wish I could say this is what I have been thinking about this week. In some respects, I have. However, the A and E I have been spending a good part of my time thinking about are two things we tend to do easily in our lives: assumptions and expectations. It is amazing how much drama, trauma, and suffering we can eliminate from our lives when we practice living an A & E free life. Today, I just want to focus on the E, and maybe next time I will focus on the A. I remember the first time I read the idea of living and loving with no expectations in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Mastery of Love

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