To All Who offer their prayers and longing here

by Naomi

Flowing Grace

To All who come to this place of peace and welcome to share with each other....

I have appreciated your faithfulness to your own experiences in your prayer and exchanges with each other, the compassion for pain, and your honesty about the emotions of loss and all that affects our wellbeing. I lost three of the major people in my life in a period of three years, and I had to enter into the darkness that follows.....and I had to reach a point of wondering what could ever give me release and freedom from the ache I felt. I lost the identity that I thought defined who I was.

Certainly, anger can act as a catalyst to empower a change in us. We reach into the darkness for that elusive joy however we can.
For me, there was something about the stripping away of my own sense of control that led me to the surrendering and emptying that opened me to God in a new way. I read, I searched, I pounded heaven to find the answers, so what I share comes from the wave of divine presence that gave me what I couldn't imagine or achieve on my own. I think it is the "agonizing loneliness" that struck me in listening and reading of the pain of others. Only God truly knows our hearts and can touch the empty places. The moment when God became real to me, not an idea or a belief or some concept that theology seemed to own, I began to live in a new way. God became the Beloved One to me.
Nothing in the universe has touched my heart with the unimaginable healing and grace and unending stream of love in the way God continues to manifest in my life in a very personal and intimate way.
I have no ability to help anyone else find the key within them. I can only witness to the living Presence of what God has to give every person who truly seeks the companionship of the Holy Spirit at a cellular level, emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, and at the deepest heart and soul level of existence. It doesn't mean that all the problems go away. It has to do with how we live with them, and how we respond to them.
The grace of magnificent love helps us to bear them and rediscover an inner joy that transforms the aching loneliness and despair and anger and whatever else may be blocking our remembrance of the Source out of which we were created. It is being bereft of purpose and meaning that can sometimes invite the wave of love that can turn us inward to discover the light of God within our own hearts instead of seeking the answers in the world.
Grace is a beautiful truth, a divine gift, and suddenly, the revelation of love can overtake our searching, and we let ourselves be loved without earning or deserving it. It is as if we were created to be loved, and then all we can do is love in return. The miracle is in every story of conversion across the world....waiting just the other side of the veil of mystery that hides God from our outer seeing. Love rises up from within us in an astounding way if we dare to allow it.
We cry out and say yes to the miracle of this life we are given and to the wondrous love that longs to be released. The Holy Spirit shapes itself to our deepest longing, and we carry a secret joy that cannot be described in mere words. There is no distance that love cannot bridge at a heart level. Heart to heart to heart we find our reason for being as the Spirit is released within us to know the ways we have been created in the image of God.
Why would I risk writing of such an experience to share with you if it weren't as available to you as it is to every heart ever created.

With much Love to each one of you,
Naomi