There is this person with whom I struggle a LOT! AND when I was really struggling and burnt out totally exhausted they gave me just the gift of space and time and place that I needed.

My struggle is valid.

This person with whom I REALLY struggle I also REALLY love.

AND God spoke that person’s words to me fully clearly as instructions for healing and growing in relationship with others.

In a room all by myself with not one other person present I HEARD God say to me: “Let yourself be known”, not audibly, and VERY clearly.

AND I did. I 100% began to let myself be known from that moment on. Then some time later I found out that those words had been a core, and often shared idea, from this person’s heart. I didn’t know that. I had never heard it before. But God shared it with me.

It’s unlikely that I would have accepted the idea without that supernatural component.

AND I still struggle with that person, AND my struggle is valid.

We are human. We are amazing AND our struggle with each other is valid.

When we can see each other with those truths aligned we will experience compassion, and we will begin to be open to seeing the near enemies of our desires.

This is not the only person with whom I struggle and whom I also love. There are tons of people with whom I have this intense an experience. In fact it’s the experience that I have with all people. I feel intensely. This is who I am.

There are a few whom I love so deeply that the struggle is epic and will never separate us, even when we seem to be separated. The struggle with them is a struggle for not a struggle against. I don’t understand this yet. I just know it to be true

I encourage, validate, and support, AND I say in love what I see that creates a struggle. I have been learning to say in love. This did not come naturally it required supernatural intervention.

AND through this journey with God, I have come to the place where it deeply matters to me that all people’s name is safe in my mouth.

AND so God has been helping me to understand the struggle AND helping me to understand the rejection and conflict thus associated.

On my 45th birthday I remember that I asked everyone who could hear me to please call Donald Trump by his name instead of calling him 45.

He has a name. He is a person affected by the experiences of his life, just like every single other human being who has ever lived. And he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, because it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle Jesus said, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Jesus wasn’t saying that wealthy people can’t enter the kingdom of God. Jesus was teaching us to be compassionate, because money often creates huge blindspots of false sufficiency, and attracts crowds who seek influence instead of honest reflective relationships.

In a dream, on the sofa in our Princess Court house in Abbotsford, in my 42nd year of life, God told me that my 45th year would be a significant one. I kept looking for the significance in that year, and JUST NOW as I write this I realized that THIS which has become the message of my heart is what made my 45th year so significant.

FUCK! Yes. I get to share another eureka moment with you, dear reader. This is one of my favourite things.

Four years after my 45th year I understand.

I’m a slow processor, and I’m so grateful for how slowly I process what I hear and experience because I feel everything SO intensely that there’s no way I could handle seeing it more quickly.

Being a slow processor is not a deficit. It is a reality of my being. It is how I thrive as myself, learning to love in this world. Being overwhelmed by the input of the world would mortally wound me. It wounds all of us.

This is why we use various means of survival which we shamefully call addictions. They help us to feel “normal” for a while, so we chase them HARD, and we find and create communities that fit our normal of that season.

I am learning as I walk with God that God slowly and surely transforms our addictions, our survival mechanisms, to healthy ways of being, if we allow Them (God) to help us transform. And the beginning of that journey of deep healing is to banish shame. The banishment may take years or seconds. It’s different for all of us, and in this realm we may never understand why.

That is why it is SO important that shame is banished among us. We don’t know what we don’t know. And as we become open to that truth in love we can have deep compassion for each other. We CAN do life with boundaries which remain stable.

Boundaries mean that we know what we will do, and we allow others the freedom to do what they will do.

Grief helps us to have beautiful boundaries. We grieve so that we need never reject anyone. We need never malign anyone. We need never gather together against anyone.

We can just keep learning to be the truth of ourselves. We keep allowing others to be the truth of themselves, and so we become open to receiving the light from each of the shards of the bigger shattered light that we all hold.

AND what an AMAZING day it will be when we all hold up our shards together with perfect love, without shame. It is said that on that day angels will fold their wings in awe.

I can barely wait.

Today’s finished product: The Warmth and Loving-kindness Blanket Company

I’ve been making this blanket for many months now. I got the fabric, then months later tied the corners. A few months later I began to cut the strips of connection. Finally today I got it done. I often stress a lot when a blanket is born in my heart for someone and I am not getting that blanket completed in what seems like quick time. And every single time it’s right.

I don’t know why it’s right today. I just know it is.

Faith. I believe in the perfection of timing, and I believe that God restores what the locusts stole even when we are our own locusts.

WarmthAndLovingkindness #Perfect

God Freed My Fucks (and became my best friend)

Foreword:

For the longest time God has been telling me to write. For some reason I thought They meant that I needed to write in a physical journal. I love the idea of journals, and I have a zillion begun, and not completed. Anyway, I kept fighting with writing because I also assumed that it needed to be an epic War and Peace length opus.

 Fuck that.

How did I get to that fuck? Here is how?

Academics kept telling me that I needed to write too, and then they laid out this box into which my writing needed to fit. This many words. That structure. They might as well have given me the keys to a rockin’ stick shift Toyota, or an Audi if we’re getting hifalutin, and then set a mountain down in front of me, as my route. I can rock the shit out of that shift, and I absolutely freeze like a sloth in headlights on mountains. Well not freeze, because I always keep moving, I actually can’t stop until I get to the base. I just move like a terrified decelerated sloth in fright mode.

Then the dearest friend of my heart wrote and published an anthology – a beautiful gift of the poetry of her heart: Rise up And Speak: In Rhyme If You Must, by Tina L. Stenmark.

I ordered it as soon as it was available, and squealed with delight on the day that I finally retrieved mine from the mailbox. Snail mail. Snail mail, Amazon. I’d been waiting for the typical Prime speedy delivery to my door. Snail mail. That makes perfect sense in light of my story though. A recurring message is that I need to slow down, and trust the process.

Fuck! Writing that was a Eureka moment for me.  I’m glad that I got to share that with you, dear reader. I love sharing these moments, especially when they show up right in the middle of my time in interaction with others. You’re not here with me physically, reader friend, and I am with you in spirit. I feel you near, and I am writing as if I was sitting in conversation with you.

This is me. Fuck yeah!

So, I opened the package and had two simultaneous moments of orgasmic joy. Look what my friend DID, and OH! I don’t have to write War and Peace. I can write as me. Even now as I write these words my heart is smiling so deeply because her work freed me.

Fuuuck. Yeah.

As I write this we are not actively in friendship, and my heart bleeds. It matters that I include this fact, because I believe in living with integrity. Life is not a fairytale. And though my heart bleeds and feels as if it will bleed from the space where we were forever, I am carrying on. We are carrying on I think, because we know that we can. God is with us – with me and with her, even if we are not any longer journeying together.

So  now I write because it is so deeply important to me to share with you the idea that we can be free if we choose to accept God’s love. To get here God freed my fucks, and became my best friend. And They want me to tell you that you can be best friends with Them too. Not with me though. I love you and all. I love being with people for blocks of time in large numbers. I love connecting with people one on one, and I have come to learn that I function best with a small kitchen table of very close friends. So let me introduce you to God, My Love, my best friend. They are still opening spaces at Their table.

Friday was May 24th. It’s a significant day and one that was filled with sadness for me this year. But God gave me hope on Friday, through Granny and the story of the man by the pool of Bethesda.

But God. Those two words mean so much to me in my “not but, I meant and” world. Anyway on Friday, Leah showed up to help us get things from the storage unit to the house. She’s a powerhouse guys. I remember when I was able to move mostly on my own, and thought I was a powerhouse. She’s a powerhouse with a loving heart who is doing the work to get to peace. We’re on that journey together even when we’re not walking side by side.

I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do on Friday, because on Thursday I was in so much physical pain, and so physically weak because of emotional pain. On Thursday I barely made it in the door to take care of a thing that was quite important.

In fact I shouldn’t have made it in the door, but I always ask, and now I can stand ready to hear and accept no. I asked and waited, and was invited in, and I was grateful.

I did a few things with supernatural strength, and then went home to bed.

On Friday as I was heading back home, God started talking with me about that Bethesda man and God’s love.

Leah showed up, listened to what was important to me, loaded her vehicle, and mine, and then left to drop off the things that she carried, while I more slowly put things back, and felt everything that I was feeling physically and emotionally.

When I got back down with the expectation that I would be helping her to put things in the vehicle, I found it loaded and waiting for me. She’d gone ahead. I felt a bit stressed, as if I had let her down somehow, and I almost let that stressful thought take control. I really needed to urinate, and I was some kilometers along on the highway home before I came back to my senses, and remembered to live as myself, and to communicate towards that end.

Old programming popped in, but my new gentle relationship with God stepped in to remind me that I am not a paralyzed people-pleaser. I am myself, and I needed to live as me.

So I got off the highway, and thankfully I was very close to one of my favourite on the road washrooms. It is always fabulously clean. I sent Leah a message, and carried on.

God had started talking with me about that Bethesda man, and reminded me of Granny’s lifelong legacy of walking as herself. She was a powerhouse too. And so am I. I walk on my knees if I need to. I forgot for a minute.

Jesus went to look for that man because for years he had been trying his best with no healing.

In almost forty years no one had helped him to the water.

Jesus came to tell him to take up his bed and walk. God was and would be with him. He didn’t know, and what we don’t know has a huge impact on our lives.

On Friday, I think God showed me that we assume that this man got up and ran. I heard Granny then asking Daddy; “Len, dem people say that I must walk faster than I can walk?”

I think that maybe he got up and walked as he could with the knowing that God was with him.

It’s so super rare to find someone who can walk with us at our pace, or maybe it’s rare to see that there are people who can walk with us at our pace, because we are so stressed by the idea that we have to walk at a certain pace to match the people who show up. And people are stressed by the idea that we should be able to stay apace with them.

So maybe as he walked the people around him showed up as themselves doing their best to walk with him.

They might have forgotten him because he was out of sight for so many years, or they got so caught up in their own lives, and they assumed that someone else would show up.

So many possible variables of the story showed up for me. In all of them the comfort was that God was there the whole time.

It made me more compassionate towards all of us when we show up, when we don’t show up, and then opened light on all the possible various thoughts and judgments running through our minds that affect our interactions whether we show up or not.

I think God showed me that just like the butterfly which someone thought it was good to help out of its cocoon, God stays with us while we walk at our best here. And when it’s needed and as often as it is needed God will wrinkle time for us, or move us supernaturally or create paths supernaturally. Sometimes people die forgotten and misunderstood. And God was with them.

Remembering the village, and asking God to help me see and appreciate the village that shows up as they can, when they can, while grieving the pain of the unfulfilled dream of conscious unity and compassion in peace has been God’s gift to me.

I really needed that gift.

Today, the process of healing in the room for a new fraternity of roomies who are in retreat at the LifeApp 3Day has been on my heart. My heart is in prayer to our Creator with gratitude for the outcome. Lives being brought to light is a beautiful beautiful thing. I’m inviting us to join in gratitude for the process and the outcome.

Today, I read about 10 year old, Sarah Rector who my heart saw as a vision of hope. She was the child of former slaves who was a part of two Indian tribes through ancestral adoption and enslavement.

In 1913, Sarah was given 160 acres of barren land as a part of a land allocation program. It seems that the idea was to fulfill the obligation to give land to her kind, while minimizing her chance of success, maybe hoping to kill her spirit and maybe even pushing her to work herself to death or to despair as she toiled uselessly on barren land.

I don’t know Sarah’s whole story, and it is said that she struck oil on that land, making her one of America’s first Afrocentric millionaires – from barren land.

The story of colonialism and colonization is the same globally with a few small variances across the world.

If we are willing to consciously face the truth we will heal, grow, and live together.

We have been equally brutalized, and if we begin to work together in recognition of our common pain, we could work toward healing and growth together with power that would unite this land – all the world being the land, because the story is the same with different players all across the world.

In our story on this side of the world, African people were stolen from their homeland, dragged across the ocean, and treated worse than or equal to animals depending on the hand of the massa under whom they fell in this land.

Indigenous people were stolen from their land, brutalized and shoved into corners so that land became suddenly free for development.

Europeans stole land from one territory and stole labour from another.

There is pain unacknowledged and unconscious energy being wasted by all players in the scenario.

Trying to compare pain leaves us expending energy that would be best spent in healing together.

Barren land takes different forms, and until we can look at the truth without shame, until we look at the truth through God’s loving compassionate eyes we will suffer needlessly. We are choosing suffering. We are choosing not to heal because we are trying to force others to heal in order to make our experience better.

Taking space to look at a whole scenario including looking at our own selves is the path to finding oil in barren land. If we stand on the barren land and use space to keep our condemnation and justification stories running through our minds we will keep just barely missing the oil on our land. We’ll keep running away to start all over again.

It’s important to know the difference between stepping away from that battle of condemnation to keep life in play with an open door to unity another day, and stepping away to pulverize an enemy so that we can preserve the rights to our barren land.

It is the difference between being focused and grounded for success in creation with a host of creators, and living in unconscious or conscious fear which steals our ability to enjoy the gift that our Creator intended when They created creators to create in cohesion with fabulous diversity.

And I know this because this is a part of my ongoing healing experience.

I invite us to open ourselves to the light of healing. Here are a few of my favourite resources:

Caste: the origin of our discontents by Isabelle Wilkerson

Homecoming by John Bradshaw

It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolyn

What Happened To You by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Parenting from the Inside Out by Dr. Daniel Siegel

The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown

Psalm 103 New Living Translation of the Bible

Wheel of Awareness

And the place where my heart is today:

https://www.lifeapp.ca/3day

I believe that we can experience healing in love now on Earth, as Jesus taught us to experience in the prayer that we call the Lord’s Prayer. Your kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven. I believe.

An open letter of gratitude, hope and love; of joy, and sanctuary; of Saran.

Yesterday evening my sweet child was spiralling in the insanity of hyper-focus and impulsivity that is a part of her neurological and psychological reality. Life affects us in ways that, as Dr. Bruce Perry says, leaves us “speaking love with an accent”. Of his patients, who are a beautiful reflection of us all he says:

Like people who learn a foreign language later in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.”
— Bruce D. Perry

At first, last evening, I was panicked, briefly terrified that we were re-entering the cycle of insanity through which we lived from February 17 to March 7.

She spiraled right back into my arms, sleeping peacefully right now beside me.

My state of panic was significantly shortened this time. That’s because God has taught me how to release her in freedom laced through and through with love. Like the prodigal son, like the lost coin, like the lost sheep, there will eventually be in all a return, and a celebration accompanying that return.

I have already summoned the Spirit of God to transform harm to victory over her. I called two whole teams to unite with me in faith for this. And when my faith sags, I can cry out to My Love, and ask Them to help my unbelief. They get it. They get me.

I have to laugh 😂 at how things go in life. I have been laughing at it all this morning. 😂😂😂 (I’m glad for emojis).

I keep saying that crisis opens doors, and it’s a truth that reminds me to slow down and respond with precision in any given moment.

Then there is God’s interaction with Elijah in 1 Kings 19:13-15, or thereabouts, on anointing Hazael and Elisha, which when interpreted says that as humans ALL of us will make some very big harmful decisions throughout the anointed course of our lives. It’s so so okay to be wrong; it is clearly not THE best, and it is OUR best.

I’ll slow down and I’ll still make BIG WRONG harmful choices. This is what it is to be human. This is where God has opened my heart, softened it, and lined it with the gold of joy and compassion, and sang the name Saran over me. Joy, refuge, sanctuary, human made of dust with whom God is infinitely patient.

And what a gracious God of love is with us, serving us, with the fullness of grace which David experienced and poured out in a beautiful tribute in Psalm 103.

May we accept the idea that this God serves us in love, calms our anxieties, expands our territory of love, and may we invite God to activate wisdom coupled with the gift of divine love and grace which understands mysteries that brings the kingdom of heaven here now on Earth as it is in heaven.

Thank you for being perfectly you. Thank you for holding space for us to be perfectly us, in Jesus name.

With love and solidarity,
Saran Lewis

“Perfection impresses it does not inspire” (Stephanie Morales-Beaulieu, Anything but Ordinary).

PS. Again, I am asking us to reflect on how generously we respond to the dead, and then I call us to assess how we are with the living with whom we have the opportunity to experience a loaves and fishes, walking on water kind of life.

This is on my heart to share with all of us, everywhere.

The message in the story of Elijah’s encounter with God regarding the anointing of Hazael, Jehu, and Elisha has been burning in my heart, for me to share with you.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Kings+19&version=NRSVA
The focus is on verses 11-17.

The spirit in these verses is the same as the spirit with which Jesus met Peter after Jesus’ resurrection. From way back then, and even before that with Adam, Eve, and Cain, God has been telling us that we are humans who deal with tares in our hearts, and so we cause harm sometimes.

What matters most is that we bring any shame associated with our actions to Jesus so that He can remind us that our dusty weakness was covered before the foundations of the world.

David profoundly experienced the grace in that reality, and so he sang of it in Psalm 103.

Jesus has sung that same song of grace over Moses, Elijah, Ezra, Balaam, Judas, Peter, Thomas, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, Paul, and on and on, and over us.

Therefore, the gift and blessing to us is that we let NO ONE despise our youth, youth being the impetuousness of adolescence that remains with us through all the stages of our lives.

The best image of the impetuousness and impulsiveness of adolescence is described by Dr. Daniel Seigel in his book, The Brainstorm. Seigel compares it to a young deer’s willingness to see how close it can get to a lion, and continue to live.

Today, I just know that if regret or shame is holding you back, there is an offer open for you to release it, and speak with courage, clarity, and integrity, as God will guide.

I don’t know if this makes any sense to you or if it is even relevant. I am offering it as it is in my heart, and you take it to God for examination in light of your story with God. Please do nothing that does not fit with God’s guidance over your heart and your personal journey.

As my dear heart sister, A, shared with me this morning, remember that God promises, in Psalm 32:8 to instruct us, and teach us in the way that we should go. And God asks us to trust that They will guide us with Their eyesight which is truly divine laser heartsight.

Be well today. It is well.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings%2019&version=NRSVA

They, (generational change in mother and child) learned to speak love with an accent.

Some years ago, I was reading The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, by Dr. Bruce Perry, and these words filled me with relief and hope: “Like people who learn a foreign language later in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.”

Often I forget this. I’m remembering this morning, with deep gratitude that future generations and the younger ones with whom I currently interact will speak love more fluently.

I’ve been frustrated in some ways, and grieving when I am conscious of it, that I learned to speak love later in life, even though the core capability existed from birth.

Then yesterday I was listening to podcast, I Am America episode 8: Identity and Disability with Conchita Hernández Legorreta, and this morning I feel so much more grateful that I know what my disability is in the world of loving, and so happy that I could gather in spaces with different sets of roomies who celebrate our later learning to speak love, and commit to supporting each other to learn more.

Can you feel my hug of solidarity, gratitude, and encouragement? We’re here to keep learning.

I’m also aware that there are some of us who haven’t learned to speak love yet. That helps me to be a bit more compassionate.

I love you. Keep showing up.

Ten years ago I had a pretty major surgery, and I was super terrified about dying under anesthesia. I went in to do it anyway, because when I decide to do a thing, I do it – right down to making a will. Because if the damn anaesthesiologist killed me, at least I had everything else under control. (I’ve been paying for my funeral for the same reason).

Long story short – I woke up feeling like a rockstar. I had a great sleep (yay anaesthesiologist) and some powerful stuff that numbed all the pain. I was walking all over that ward at Langley Hospital – bouncing off the walls on a super duper rested high – a couple of annoying organs and uninvited squatters lighter.

The nurses and doctor were amazed. I was discharged that same night because I was so happy and full of energy(cue Pharrell).

And then I woke up the next morning…

Fuck! It hurt, and my friend who’d stayed overnight had gone to work. Intestinal bloating, paiiiin. Expelling that gas? PAIIIIIIIN. Tiny incision sites. Pain. Please God. Senokot. Did I say pain?? Kill me now.

Prescription for pain medication filled. Sweet relief. Then I rested and took it as easy as I needed to take it for the next six weeks.

Ten years down the line I have a rare twinge that I think may be related to overdoing it in the first few post-op hours. Otherwise, shedding those problematic bits was the best decision that I’d ever made.

Moral of the story? When we go through any healing processes we will feel pumped full of hope and refreshed by the sweet rest of love. That’s so perfectly wonderful. Enjoy that. And also know that healing takes time. So let’s be joyfully gentle with ourselves.

We may share common healers and healing processes, and please remember that our recovery will be very unique to us, because our internal chemistry and life circumstances are as varied as the number of stars in the sky.

We’re all healing, friends, I have faith in that. I can see the sun rising for each of us in perfect time. It’s all right.

💚🌈🦋🌅

PS: Like two or three days after surgery I went to church on another I’m a happy warrior high. Drove myself there 🤦🏾‍♀️.

I’m a slow and stubborn processor. Slow – beautiful; ideas marinate, release their natural essence and meld, producing amazing flavour. Stubborn – well pain teaches lessons too. Grateful for that and hopeful that I will keep stepping out of the hole of stubbornness. Because the flip side of stubbornness is being resolute, and I am that too.

“We have once again invited a woman of color to the table and asked for her story, promising to be good listeners, but we have failed. We haven’t honored the pain of her telling it. We haven’t sat with what she says. We haven’t defended her when she was attacked. It’s not okay.” Author not cited.

I feel this deeply. I agree with what the author says here. They were writing in response to a scathing review of Mekdes Haddis’ book: A Just Mission.

I was originally sharing this quote, with a link, and then I realized that so often I share these things, and write similar things because I want to shine light on the shame that is crippling us and driving us apart, but then I realized that by doing this I am holding up one individual as a public scapegoat in shameful sacrifice.

That’s not what resilient traumatized Jesus would do, and I want to be more like Him. I share the writer’s pain around the condemnation of Mekdes’ words, but I think that I am realizing that Jesus shared the better ways of love with us in clear, general terms. He flogged corrupt religious systems, but He never flogged an individual as far as I can recall.

Resilient traumatized Jesus who from birth experienced what it meant to be hunted in order to be neutralized as a threat to power, who understood what it meant to be a part of an oppressed group, who understood what it was like to be a refugee, who understood what it was like to be labelled a bastard child, who understood what it meant to live in a ghetto etc etc etc allowed people to speak without condemning them or shaming them publicly or privately.

It seems like over and over, Jesus fraternized with everyone, He ate with everyone, He knelt in the dirt with everyone, and quietly assured individuals that He would never condemn them, while urging them to carry on and do better. And He challenged corrupt, misguided religious systems.

Resilient, traumatized Jesus, I’m failing hard at being more like Him.

I was being quite hard on myself when I clearly saw what I was doing this morning, which immediately prompted me to edit what I had originally posted – which was just the opening quote with a link.

As I’m reflecting I realize that I didn’t feel shame though. So as My Love (God) continued talking with me, in conjunction with something else amazing that my dear friend, Tina, shared with me today – incredible feedback to grow. I just felt reassured.

They were like, “Look closer, Adia.” This is not who you are, this is a growth opportunity. Look at who you are. Where are you headed today? How has your life been reflecting this light that you haven’t been quite unconsciously competent in yet?”

And just now as I was typing this to share it with my dear friend, my eyes were lifted, almost involuntarily, like my whole face gently lifted upwards to a plaque that she gave me which is on my wall of love and strength above my bed… and now I have tears, loved, loving, empowered, recovering hyper-independent tears.

“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name: you are Mine.” Isaiah 43:1

My Love (God) continuously gives me “feedback to grow” with no hint of shame, only love. I am so grateful.