Blog 1563 – 12.28.2019

You’re Beautiful

As I enjoy a rare, at least for the last seven years, holiday break at home with my wife and son in warm and wonderful Houston, Texas I am beginning to feel that itch to be on the road again seeing new places and meeting new people and finding beauty in them. As today’s picture with the Emerson quote reminds me – wherever we go, whomever we meet, we only and always see the reflected beauty that we carry within us.

This time-space people-faced world in which we find ourselves is one that only mirrors Who and Whose we are. That again? Yes. It is a familiar and favorite theme of mine, and one of my most enjoyed discoveries. Paraphrasing an old love song I say, “I traveled all around the world but was never far from me.” Someone has said that the trouble with traveling to get away from your troubles is that we always take the prime troublemaker with us. No sense praying for world peace till we come to terms with and make peace with ourselves. Love is indeed the answer but I fear we miss the point. It is not really about loving God, nor our neighbor so much as it is about really loving ourself, the most difficult job you’ll ever love. Ego, the great and only enemy of our souls, hates us, and would see us forever disappointed and unhappy, hating ourselves. He/she deals like one of ego’s best names, Satan, implies, with leveling charges. The word Satan literally means, “accuser of the brethren.”

The Bible writers often ask questions and in the same breath give the answers. Two of my favorites from the New Testament are:

“If God be for us who can be against us?”

and

“Who shall separate us from the love of God?”

The answer to both is given:

Romans 8:38-39 New King James Version (NKJV)

“For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God…”

I do not believe Jesus came either to fulfill the prophecy of a tired old religion nor to set up a new one but to remind us of Who and Whose we all are, have always been, and will ever be – Love Incarnate. In one sense we are everyone of us that beloved and only begotten baby, God’s most complete and precious creation but in yet a higher, better, fuller sense we are Co-Creators of all there is and nothing (no thing) can separate us from the love of God for we are the Love of God. Love, God, is all there is and that is all there is to it.

There was never original sin only a little lie we told to ourselves, that we could choose to be someone we are not, apart from God, a face, a place where He/She is not. Neither Jesus nor any of the great teachers and prophets down through the ages ever came to call us out or to call us home. They came just to remind us that beauty, home, heaven, and happiness have always been waiting to be found in our own hearts.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1odEewEZo1bpoztoKQQ2_se6-BPGQyVAM/view?usp=drivesdk

You’re Beautiful