When sinful thoughts creep up on us

I have a past that contains many actions that I’m not proud of. Actions that have left their mark on me. Actions that have created memories that now and then enter my thoughts and affect my mood and physical sensations in different ways. 

Those memories are of things that most people at most would consider character flaws and many would even wholeheartedly accept as just parts of being a modern human with modern appetites. But I believe that we are called on to strive for purification, not just in actions, but in thoughts and words. I don’t believe that we are called to do this to avoid punishment or reap rewards, but because this is what will allow us to live in more an more harmony with God in his creation. 

The best way to approach this that I’ve found is to neither judge ourselves nor the thoughts. To not try to push them away. If I manage to remain present and just observe the thoughts, they tend to go away, if my general attitude towards them is that I don’t want them in my life anymore.

The only good excess

I want to approach my whole outer life with moderation. Not too much or too little of anything. The only thing that I wish to overflow is God. I want to be completely filled up by God on the inside. This is the only way to be fully satisfied. And yet, I keep on trying to satisfy myself with outer things, such as food, drinks or leisure activities. I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with this. I believe that God wants us to enjoy his creation. But too much of the world, will always diminish that which we can never have too much of. Which is God.

Wash away my sins

I want to be me. I don’t want to seize and go up into some impersonal bliss, as some Eastern spiritualities teach. I want to meet the people I love again. It doesn’t matter how good this impersonal bliss might feel. I don’t want to lose myself.

But I want to lose all that is not me, that I cling onto and make into me. I want to lose all that which is not divine within me. I want to be who I truly am.

Are we victims of circumstances?

There seems to be two camps when it comes to this question. Either you are just that - a helpless victim of circumstances. Or you are the master of your inner life, that can respond any way you choose to what is happening by just changing your thoughts about it.

When I look at my own experience, the truth seems to fall somewhere in between. And where I am on the scale seems to shift depending on different factors. At the core of it, as with so many things, is how present I manage to be. If I can remain focused on what is going on, both on the inside and outside (primarily on the inside) I have much more control over my responses to the given situation. Furthermore, the more emotionally triggering a situation is, the harder it becomes to remain present. And once I’m swept away by my emotions, it’s almost impossible to reclaim my presence. 

I also have a choice between different thought patterns concerning a situation. What I cannot do however, is make myself believe that a situation that I find terrible is in fact good. Or even neutral. What is possible, is to train myself to find certain situations less and less intolerable. I for example don’t find financial setbacks as painful as I used to. But I still don’t like them. And it’s still easy to fall into thought patterns about how much work I’ve put in for nothing, when I unnecessarily lose money. But I can also think about how struggles help to strengthen my character, thus make me more resilient in the future and thus pave the way for future success. I can even think that God wants to teach me something valuable through my hardships, or that there is some other meaning to what is happening, that I cannot see from where I currently am. These thought patterns are all within my range of possibilities. And the more I choose one type of thought pattern over another, the easier it will be in the future to choose that type. 

In the past, I’ve been prone to choose the more negative type though. And it’s not easy to change. Change takes time and is uncomfortable. But now that I know a few basics about how I function, I believe that change will be much easier. 

I have found that the best way to approach unpleasant circumstances, is to observe them without reacting. This takes practice though. I used to beat myself up for not being able to remain positive in the face of hardships. I had more or less swallowed the idea that a positive mindset is just a choice. Today I believe that it can be a choice. But to make it into one takes practice. We have a lot of baggage to let go of. But it does come down to taking a step back and observe. Because when we react to things, we aren’t really there anymore. This is a little difficult to communicate, so bear with me here, because this part is important. We have unconsciously learned that we always have to do something in the different situations that we face. And so we force things. And when we try to force things, we try to do it on our own. When we stop forcing, we can allow God to take over. The first step is to learn to observe what is going on without trying to do anything. To learn that we don’t have to do anything. 

I’m very far from being perfect at this. But I have experienced it. And there is such a huge difference here, that it means everything. On the one hand, we struggle with the world and everything in it. On the other, we relax, let go and when we know what comes natural, which we will in the same degree as we manage to let go of the impulse to force things, we can choose to simply do what comes natural. But for such a long time, we've learned to not do what comes natural. We have learned to live in a struggling, reactive mindset. And change takes time. And is uncomfortable. Furthermore, it's uncomfortable in a completely different way from normal change. Because the uncomfortable doesn't come from something that we have to struggle with to overcome. It comes from an inner resistance that causes us to feel anxiety. This resistance can't be attached to something tangible. It comes from nothing but the ego's unwillingness to give up its illusion of self-sufficiency. And yet, even though, ultimately, it is an illusion, its pull seems more powerful than any challenge we've ever faced. But it is an illusion.

I will try to explain this more clearly in future posts, because it’s important in a life-changing kind of way. But difficult to explain. Maybe because I’m trying to force an explanation… ;)

I wish to conclude with the following: Some people are strong on their own and seem to do fine without God. I’m not one of those people and I don’t want to be either. Whether we need God to carry us or not, we always need God in our lives. If my weakness helps me remember this need, then my weakness is a strength. I have a feeling that life will be easy, once we allow God to be fully present in every part of our lives.

Starting with what I know

I know that God exists. I cannot say that I exactly know who God is, or the nature of God. I believe that I can be fairly certain in ascribing certain attributes to God. These would be: “intelligent”, “personal” and “having a will”. 

I can also be certain of that there is some kind of unseen spiritual reality. What this reality is exactly, I again cannot know.

These things I’ve seen enough evidence of in my own life, to be certain of. I know that I can’t prove them to anyone. Or that God exists at all. But from personal experience, I can know this for myself. I’m not asking anyone to take my word for it. But with a bit of openness, I believe that anyone can find proof that God exists. Just not the kind of proof that can be tested in a laboratory or be objectively verified in any other way. 

I can also see the truth of what Jesus taught. I have no idea when it comes to historical claims. I simply wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that they are unimportant or that there is no way of at least determine probability. The resurrection, for example, is believed in by many scholars, because of the amount of witnesses, and certain circumstances around how it was told and who the witnesses were. 

I’ll might look more closely into this and other claims in the Bible later in my life. Probably. 

But what I want to get at, is that the more I look into what Jesus taught, the more struck I become by how hard it is to live by, not because of what it demands of our bodies or intellects, but because of the humility it demands. And also how easy life would be if we could live by it. All we have to do is to swallow our pride.

So why is this so hard? As an example: I’ve been tricked into buying crappy cars three times in my life. Once for me. Once for me and my wife and once for my wife’s son (sidenote: when writing this, I realised that all three times, I wanted something to happen fast. Don’t ever let your decisions be governed by wanting something to happen fast!). If I want to seriously follow Christ, I need to pray for these sellers and do my best to feel no grudge towards them. 

Or, me and my wife were tricked into a rental contract of five year for a machine for our company, that had a forced insurance that made the monthly payment twice as expensive. Also in this case, I will need to do my best to love my enemy and turn the other cheek. At the times when this happened I didn’t think this way though. In fact, I said loads of angry things about these people. I can even still get angry sometimes, since we’re still paying the penalty fee for breaking the contract with the company. And at the fact that there are dishonest people in the world in general. And so on. But none of this changes the facts of my life or of the world. 

I could give more examples. But what this amounts to is to a large extent acceptance. Lack thereof. And pride. “These things happen, but they shouldn’t happen to me, because I’m so great…” 

Jesus taught humility and acceptance. And looking at these examples and numerous others, it’s easy to see ho much easier life would be if we practiced these things. And that we really have nothing to lose from doing so. But we don’t. If we did, our lives would be very different. We would feel different. A huge burden would lift from our shoulders. But we prefer to be angry because circumstances aren’t the way that we think that they ought to be.

These are some of the things that I do know. Things that I think that I could work with.

A helping hand

I have started to notice something interesting. Namely that the more present I am in what I’m doing and what is going on in general, I seem to be guided somehow. For example: I know what a good walking posture should feel like. Since my body is full of blockages and tensions though, I often fall back into a less than optimal posture. But when I’m present with my body and actively try to not go in and force anything with my mind, its movements and what is going on around me, it is as if my body assumes the right posture. 

It’s the same with breathing. 

From my experience, it feels sort of as if letting go and just allow is the most natural thing in the world, but at the same time the most difficult, because we have for such a long time practiced to force things. I believe that when we relax and let go, we actually allow God to take over and do things for us instead. 

Be like children 2

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 18:3

Now, I don’t believe in the story of Adam and Eve in a literal sense (but if you believe otherwise I respect that and you’re welcome to try and change my mind). But I think that it has a lot to teach us. I actually read this in another blog. 

What I believe that it has to teach us, is that before the fall (again, I believe the fall should be seen metaphorically), Adam and Eve lived in complete trust and vulnerability before God. They had an absolute faith in their father’s will and had no wish come up with a better solution to life on their own. 

Now, we know that it’s not that easy. Because we have egos. Therefore, we can’t just read the bible, or any other text for that matter, and expect to find God’s will there in a form that we just can believe and accept. But I think that meditating on the call to “become like little children” can help us along the way.

We can't stop thinking

To many, this isn’t news. But to many it is. It was for my very intelligent grandfather when, seven years ago, when he was 96, I told him this. We didn’t speak much more about it, but I think considering that he was a very curious person all the way to his death, he must have found this fascinating. Thinking about it, I wish that I would have followed up the discussion some more. We could have probably had a very i interesting talk about it. But sadly, this was before I started to realise just how unconsciously I was approaching many thing in my life.

But I’m getting off track here. Maybe there is a point to getting off track sometimes though. 

What I want to get at, is that we have this constant wordmachine going on in our heads, that also generates diffuse images, sounds, songs, scenes etcetera. And for a long time, I more or less unconsciously assumed that I was this wordmachine, without giving much conscious thought to how it functioned. Or why it was there and did what it did. I even, again mostly unconsciously, assumed that I was in control of it. 

I believe that the above description of my thoughts is more or less true of most people. And the more I think of this, the more interesting (and also a bit frightening) I think that it is. To repeat: We have a constant wordmachine etc. in our heads that we unconsciously assume is us, and this is something that many people go through their whole lives without reflecting upon. With this reasoning in mind, I want to conclude with a question: Do you or don’t you think that thoughts play a significant role in shaping our actions and lives?

Be like children

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 18:3

This bible verse has stood out to me for a long time, for some reason that I can’t fully put my finger on, even if I will try to do my best. I think that it has a significance for everyone, but that it has acquired a special significance for me. I think this is partially due to the fact that on the one hand, I’ve gradually lost my innocence through the way I’ve lived my life, while the childlike awe and wonder has gotten buried deep under tragic events and parts of my life. And on the other hand, I’ve instead acted childish by refusing to take responsibility and taking a general immature stance towards the events in my life. I believe that this state is true for most people to different degree. Some, like me, have more of it in their pasts than others. I also believe that if we want to be truly happy, this is something that we need to work on changing, with the help of God.

Short on prayer

I’ve realised that I can treat my experience of prayer in vastly different ways. In prayer as in no other practice, it has become clear whether I’m doing something heartfelt or not. If I’m there, if I’m really speaking to someone and if there  is any true meaning behind my words. I have often caught myself approaching prayer as just something I expect myself to do. I’ve used some nice words about gratitude, forgiveness, guidance or whatever. But I haven’t really been there. I haven’t really thought about what I’ve been saying. Often, I have been somewhere else in my thoughts. And I haven’t intentionally directed my prayer towards God.

I know that this type of absent-mindedness can be found in many of my activities. But as I said, I’ve seen it most clearly in prayer. Felt the difference between it and really being engaged in what I’m doing.

About the Blog

We want to help people that live every-day lives to live and grow together with God, every second of their lives, 24-hours per day.

This presentation will soon be changed to include David's wife and twin-flame Jessica, who is now also blogging with me. However, much that can be said about David can also be said about Jessica.

About David:

A few years ago, I realized that I was an absolute mess inside. In spite of having been engaged in loads of spiritual activities and self-searching, my thoughts were chaotic and uncontrolled, and I was to a large extent governed by my emotions. And I was still to a large extent a stranger to myself. The motifs behind my actions and words weren’t what I thought they were and my behavior was to a large degree unconscious. I even felt as if most of who I was, wasn’t really me and that a lot of what came out of my mouth lacked substance.

And the more I saw this mess inside myself, the more I started seeing it in other people. We are all God’s children. But we are broken. And I was more broken than most. In some ways, I still am. I also believe that my brokenness has a meaning. Because by nothing but unearned grace of God, I’ve been allowed to see my brokenness much more clearly than most people.

Because of this, I’ve decided that I want to do everything that I can to become whole again and help others do the same. My journey to become whole, so that none of my confusion, pride and self-deceit will stand between me and the love of my creator, and the insights that I gain along the way, is what I wish to offer. This is also a declaration of intent.

So, this is a blog about living in harmony with God’s creation. This means being our true selves. And this in turn means living in accordance with God’s will. By our own free will. Because we know intellectually, emotionally and spiritually that this is what we want. Not because of fear of punishment or the hope of rewards, but because God is perfect and the ultimate cause and meaning of life. And therefore there exists no better, more joyful life.

Finally, I believe that the only thing that stands between us and knowing God's will is our egos. Without the ego, we wouldn't need to read a single line to know God's will. But hopefully this blog can offer some food for thought, while you struggle with yours.