Gateway to Health: Spirituality

 John 4:24 KJV “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

Some people are defined by the religion they practice whether Catholic, Methodist, Baptist etc., the list goes on and on. I like to think I am defined by my spirituality, not a religion.

A healthy spirit is needed to get through the muck and mire that life deals you. Just as a healthy body gets you through illnesses attacking you and an unhealthy body has your immune system putting you on notice that, guess what, you’re not healthy.

One might ask how to obtain a healthy spirit and I can honestly wholeheartedly say, this is one thing on earth you can’t get with the almighty dollar. You can’t tithe and donate your way into a healthy spirit, you can’t buy candles or stones and think your way into a healthy spirit, you can’t get a vaccination against the evil spirits lurking the wild; a healthy spirit needs to be tended from within every second of every living day. Hard work but not impossible.

I’ve heard people call me a ‘Jesus freak’, a ‘bible thumper’ and even ‘a hypocrite’ all because I nurture my spirit in ways maybe no one else does. I like to think we’re all the same but just as this disease that has taken up a home in my body is unique to my body, no two believers are the same. We are all unique in our own way.

When you attend church, are you there to worship God or are you there to see who else is attending? Do you look at the shabby clothes one is wearing and compare the suit and tie guy to him? Are your eyes fixed on the extremely short skirt that Mildred is wearing compared to your ankle length skirt? Or are you there to praise and worship God?

Read this story and let me know if you fit in here. 

I realize I don’t fit in anywhere. I am a homeless person among onlookers. I am a leper among the unscathed. I am a fellow sinner among men. I am Spirit-filled to the end. My spirit is full of God and that is why I don’t fit in. I love all that He created, I love my fellow man even the ones who don’t seem to be wanting or in need of love, I love them anyway. My spirit is full because of LOVE. God is my breath in the morning, my lunch in the afternoon, a delectable filling dinner, and my companion at bedtime.

2 Cor. 6:17-18 “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.”

We cannot all be the same, God never intended us to be that way, we’re unique. When we are filled with the Spirit we sometimes look the same and are like magnets drawn to one another but we soon realize while we are like-minded we are all different on different paths, different roads, different purposes and different completion. God wanted us different but united by one thing… by our love!

We become children of God when we drink in His Holy Spirit. One can be an avid reader of the Bible, attend church weekly, wear the garments of being a Christian but still not be filled with His Spirit.

Deut. 30:1, 6, 19-20 “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days; and that you may dwell in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.”

Did you read that? Obey His voice, cling to Him, He is your LIFE and the length of your days. This is no small fete. He’s not asking you to passively get to know Him, He’s asking you to LOVE, LISTEN, and OBEY! He is the only one who gets to choose whether you live or die. So many humans are riddled with selfishness that we don’t quite comprehend this. We cannot hold fast to the materials of this world, the food, the books, the clothes or the money, it is not ours to cling to and if you say, “I worked for it!” Yes, you did but let me ask, when God calls you home, are you going to take your money with you and tell Him how you can’t leave it behind because ‘you earned it’?

Our spirit doesn’t know money. Money is of the materialistic physical realm. God is not money, God is Spirit! Spirituality is a connection, a relationship with God IN you not God outside of you. Meaning, God is not bits and pieces of the religious you. That is the physical you and what you’ve shaped in this physical world. That is your way of trying to connect to the Spirit of God. Remember what I said earlier, God is love? The Spirit of God is already in you and your free will allows a choice to stray from Him, embrace Him, or become ONE with Him. When your spirit is so full of LOVE that breathing hate is no longer a part of your being, you are becoming one with the Spirit of God.

You become one with everything living and breathing. Your soul opens to nature and all the natural beatings of the rhythms of the sound of the earth. The vibrations awaken in you a sight of God that you formerly never saw because you were too busy with the physical aspects of loving your Father. Spirituality is the meditations of the soul connecting with the Higher being dwelling within you that has now been awakened, God.

Matt. 22:37-40 “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Until you live and breathe these commandments, you have not soulfully or spiritually connected to the Holy Spirit. God is LOVE! Once you connect to the Father-board, boot up your system, you will feel the love course through your veins; for all those around you, your enemy, for those you formerly hated, and for those you disagree with. LOVE becomes your new way of living a spirit-filled life. You will now find yourself full of the Spirit

This is what God intended when He created us. He wanted us to be so full of love the world couldn’t view the hate. Instead what’s happened is the world is so full of hate it can no longer see the love. Sure we go to church, view people, see the steeple, hear a message but how many times in a week do you carry the message home with you, and actually LIVE the message of LOVE? Well, let me just say if more people carried the word, the world would not be the train wreck we have in front of us. You’ll find spirituality underneath the rubble.

Jer. 1:16 “And I will utter my judgments against them touching all their wickedness, who have forsaken me, and have burned incense unto other gods, and worshipped the works of their own hands.

May the Word of the Lord bless you all! 

An Event Full Night

Ecc. 2:14 “The wise man's eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all.”

An EventFULL Night…

After yesterday’s post and the evening’s lousy night sleep I had the night before, I needed a distraction; something to focus on besides my drama issues. It came via a text message from my son yesterday morn. He was at work and was letting me know he was running late and he’d explain more when he got home. He’s been working the 11-7 shift since earlier this week when a three-year employee was ‘let go’. The man was fired but politely they call it ‘let go’.

Anyway, I live in a nothing-ever-happens kind of state. Statistically, we’re 85% cows. In other words, just farmland and small towns where nothing juicy ever really happens. Now keep in mind, I’m originally from Baltimore, Maryland where events like the one I’m about to tell you about happens every hour on the hour.

I think I see now why my son WANTED to work at a hotel as opposed to a pizza place, food store, or in retail. Hotels generally have an air of mystery surrounding them (think Shining) and this is the job he wanted and landed and has been HAPPY with for two full months now! (Yay)

So let me set the lead into an event full evening (technically morning) he had. Last week during a full house (88 rooms or so, taken) because of the Solar Eclipse, his hotel experienced a total blackout for 22 hours, due to a treacherous lightning storm, where he almost stepped on downed live wires, I might add! He handled the event like a champ. Even his boss was well pleased with his handling of his entire shift in the darkness situation. His position is a Front Desk Clerk, where he knows all and sees all that’s passing through the front doors of the Overlook Hotel. (real name of hotel protected for obvious reasons)

On the thirtieth, my son was asked to stay at work a couple minutes later because the ladies needed to feel protected from the events that took place that morning across the road. Him, and coincidentally a male trainee were present, so they both stayed while things calmed down. Apparently, the hotel across the road was robbed at knifepoint. No one was injured in that incident where the perp had loitered for hours before robbing the clerk, by wielding a knife demanding all of their money. The perpetrator got away with an undisclosed amount of money, just to note, hotels have very little cash because everyone uses credit! The police were scanning the other hotels in the area, putting employees on high alert making them aware of what took place. My thoughts were ‘wow, this kind of stuff never happens here!’ It made the news, by the way. Also another note, there are about twelve hotels in that vicinity, all within close proximity because of the closeness on and off the major highway. An update as of today, the man was arrested without incident at a convenience store.

Then yesterday the thirty-first happened, I received a cryptic text from my son saying something about his boss making him stay because he was high! This from a kid, okay he’s twenty-one, but has never smoked anything legal or otherwise, nor has alcohol passed his lips! So when he said he was high, I began to wonder. I heard the car nearing the house with the blaring music 'round the corner of our driveway, and laughter. He is never one to belt out laughter but there it was sounding like a young man after a night of partying!

He came in the door laughing, giggling all over himself. I said, “What on earth happened?” At first, I thought cleaning supply fumes or something like that, but no, his story was much more colorful than that.

It seems that at around 2 a.m. four police officers came into the hotel asking him questions about a wanted criminal. They suspected he might be in the hotel. They were led there by something you’d see on that show Stupid Criminals, a room key was left at the gas station next door; the perpetrator had left it behind. My son verified that the man and three other men had checked into the hotel.

Apparently, one of the men was wanted for the murder of a small child in Chicago. There was also a possibility that one of them was a suspect in the knife wielding robbery of the day before at the hotel across the road. Now what I am about to say is not meant in a racist way by any means, but when four shady looking African American men show up in a basically 90% white community, radars are normally raised, not in a racist or politically correct manner either. My son was raised in a heavily populated black community so his bars weren’t raised that high, but obviously, the police officers knew something no one else did. I believe white thugs would raise the same bars of suspicion just so you know.

The officers had to wait for a search warrant and when it finally arrived the action ensued. He didn’t say how it all went down but can you imagine, my son, fairly new to the job experiencing this? Remember, he was trying to do his work through all of this and he had to remain calm and professional at the front desk. The officers went up to retrieve the perpetrators but returned with only one screaming man, yelling expletives, in his underpants as they hauled him off to the car, while the other officers stayed in the room to ‘collect evidence’. The other men had already gone and moved on, I guess.

When the officers left with bags of marijuana taken from the premises by six-thirty, his boss had arrived for work. Yes, being the good boss that she is had stayed in touch throughout the night. My son was informed that he’d have to take an ozone ionizer to the room because of the smell, so off he went, unknowingly walking smack dab into a heavily filled room of smoke and residual crap. Hour upon hours of the men smoking weed had built up in the closed room. Apparently, the officers happily took what they needed and left the rest behind for the hotel to clean up.

My son said there were remnants of weed/marijuana everywhere, cans and trash literally, porn, beer cans, and remnants of smoked weed. He had to get around everything to plug the ozone ionizer in and just being in the room for ten minutes left him buzzed from having contact with the toxin filled room. When he came down and gave an assessment of the room to his boss, he was giggling all over himself, she exclaimed, “Your high aren’t you!” Laughing he went on to say how the room looked and all that needed to be taken care of before the room could ever be rented out again. She informed him he shouldn’t drive home yet. She knows my son well enough to know he’s not done anything like beer/weed so he was obviously buzzed and it might not be safe for him to drive.

He came home happy as a clown at a kids birthday party. Through bright smiles and giggles, he said, “Is this what it feels like? I like it! Everything looks so, so, vibrant!” His actions scare me because what he, as a good citizen has stayed away from, met him front and center. After taking his shower before going off to bed he stated, “I’m hungry.” That’s when I laughed, he had the munchies and his first contact buzz ever after an event full night at work!

May Fever and a Blessed Day

Job 3:6 “As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months.”

Did you miss me? I didn’t think so. 

Well, last week I caught May fever and wrote posts for five days in a row cornering me into an ‘I need a break’ phase. The weather has been a pleasant 60ish to 70ish, not the unbearable 80ish I, and my body, so detest. We’ve had plenty of rain that is keeping the roads nice and muddy and the grass long and lanky one day after a mowing. 

The farming season has begun with the trucks barreling down the road, tillers tilling the fields, and the ever sneezy atmosphere of the fertilizer sprays. Did I mention the tree pollen and my neighbors' twelve-inch grass blowing in the wind? Please don’t say, “Do the neighborly thing and mow it for her,” she has a working riding mower and only mows the property that she lives in not the property (trailer) she rents and keeps as a dog house. Ahh, the life in the country that I would not trade for the world!

Today marks our one-year wedding anniversary and yes, we made it a whole year, coupled with the thirteen years that we dated. We might go out to lunch and then take in an afternoon movie. No, I will not be seeing a Marvel movie, hopefully. Somewhere I matured and am so not into superheroes. (minus my Christian Bale Batman excitement). They just wear too thin in the CGI category and no real plot to the story with hot nobodies turned into superwomen somehow. I roll my eyes half the time frustrating the man beside me who grew up a comic book fan and has to see every Marvel movie ever made!

I won’t be doing my much-loved gardening this year since I don’t have a tiller, can’t do the garden work because of my back problems, so I’m just going to let what flowers come up, appear and tend to them upon arrival.

Today is Friday the Thirteenth and while many think this is a bad luck day, I see it as a GOOD numbered day since this is the day we wed one year ago, and it is our thirteenth year of being together. I don’t believe in luck but if there is such a thing, thirteen would be my lucky number! 

Minus the 35 MPH sustained winds, all in all, it was a good day. We went to lunch at the China Buffet and had a delicious very filling meal where we came home afterward to sit and feel bloated. This little woman fills up after two plates and dessert. We stopped at a nursery on the way home and bought some Salvia for my garden. They are hardy perennials that I know will return year after year.

We wobbled home and began watching a movie called Failure to Launch, a clean, funny, romantic comedy that had me in stitches! It starred Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker. I LOVE Matthew and have only heard of Jessica; never really seen her in anything before.  Instead of spending $40 that it would take to go to a theater we saved our money and bought plants instead.

By serendipity, the weeks end happened. I say serendipity because hubby was going to ask for the two days off but when he received his schedule, his boss already had him off for two days, today and tomorrow too. See? Friday the 13th is a GOOD day! We made it an entire year! Woohoo! Okay, after spending thirteen years together I thought that was funny. 

I’ve got great friends who all gave me well wishes and it turned out to be a blessed day. Now onto another movie… You’ve Got Mail! And a full moon tonight…… *twilight zone music plays*

God Bless!

Job 41:17 “They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.”