Vassily Kandisky. Autumn in Murnau. Private collection.
Loving God, I realize now that I have to be open to everything if I want to change and grow more deeply into the love and knowledge of You, who are everything and in everything. I can only move towards wholeness by recognizing and turning off the old head tapes that have programmed me for far too long so that I can hear You speaking to me always in newness. Faith brought me to love and joy and wholeness, but fear has kept me clinging to my old ways and small opinions. I desperately want to see and let go of all of my emotional security blankets in order to move back to an open, childlike trust in You—however You chose to reveal Yourself to me.
You are God, and I am not. You are in the smallest details of life—how could You not be? You create and sustain all of life, yet my heart continues to interrogate You rather than contemplate You. “Why do you allow so much suffering and injustice in the world? Why are You allowing this evil in our country? Why did you let this happen to me? Why don’t You answer me?” I continue to seriously think I can break into Your great and powerful darkness with my oh, so finite understanding. I’m tired and I want to change—please help me. The suffering way of Jesus is total willingness, total acceptance, and total trust. I want to live like that; trusting that new life flows out of the choices and changes I make, and all I let go of.
Gracious Lord, open my eyes to my radical interconnection with You and to that mystical sense of belonging to all things in the deep intimacy of Your perfect love. Such a relationship lifts me to a plane of truth and trust that neither sorrow, nor loss, nor brutality, nor horror can disturb. Intensify my desire to see You pervading everything, holding it all together by the cords of Your creative love. Help me to live into this sacred understanding by embracing my pain and allowing time for the fire of love to melt and merge me into oneness with You and the suffering world. Giving such loving attention to You—the One—is at the same time giving loving and compassionate attention to the many. This sacrificial life can only flow out of a heart that has persevered through much suffering and has found its way to the Source.
I commit to an ever greater opening up to Your love that is at once the source, transforming power, and joy of all human existence; imminent, transcendent, and beyond. It will require giving words to my most intimate experiences, communicating as honestly as possible all of my suffering, sorrow, and pain, as well as my peace and my joy. It will require that I yield layer after layer of the mistrust, anger, and pain that has encased my heart for so long. Thus I will come at last to see that my desire for You is in fact an echo of Your far more encompassing and passionate desire for me. I will become a living witness to the awakening of Your divine life in me—to what I have seen with new eyes, heard with new ears, and loved with a new heart—offering others a glimpse of light in the midst of their confusion, darkness and pain. It is the love, hope, and encouragement of You in Whom all is lost yet all is found.
From The Hidden Life Awakened pp 91-92:
“There is within us all this strong desire for the freedom to live and be whole, but it takes enormous courage and discipline to make the choice to trust God and do the difficult work this requires. Taking those initial steps toward change can be so frightening and painful that we often quit before we have a chance to experience any healing. The old voices in our head tell us it won’t work, things will only get worse, and we’re wasting our time. The new voice in our heart tells us that if we don’t change, we won’t grow, so dare to let go, trust God, and make the choice to change, regardless of how hard it is.
Change and growth are synonymous. We have a choice, and our choice is critical because it is either life-giving or life-draining. Failure to dare to change keeps us trapped in old behavior patterns that obviously haven’t worked, so why not open and take a chance on trust? Old behavior patterns are so hard to break because they are deeply rooted in our childhood wounds. The more we develop new behavior patterns, though, the easier the work becomes, and we slowly begin to see our lives bear fruit.”
Click here to watch Betty talk more about turning off the old head tapes.