Making Space for God

Transcript

Betty Skinner, the inspiration for The Hidden Life Awakened, discusses letting go of the negative and letting love in instead:

Well, it’s imperative that we begin to forgive, because resentment, as we hoard it up, is such negative energy that it doesn’t leave much room for healing. When we talk about forgiveness, we must understand that it is total. I mean the person may be guilty, but it’s an unconditional forgiveness. It’s the same sort of forgiveness that God forgives us with. So, I think all of these things begin to merge as we move toward wholeness. We’ll find that we are much less resentful, much less judgmental, much less controlling, much less competing, much less comparing—and you can go on and on with all this negative stuff that we get bound up in, because as that’s released, the love comes in and the negative—compete, compare, control, complain—just begins to go. I can’t explain it; it’s a mystery, but that’s what we were talking about: not restoration but transformation. That’s transformation. That’s God’s work as we open to it. You must understand that our part is simply to open to it. Waiting is a huge piece in our spiritual growth because we are always filled with our own expectations, our own illusions and so on. To wait open-endedly is to wait in solitude, silence, and prayer. And I’d like to add another word here. It is to be still and to know that I am God. These three merge in a sense—the solitude, the silence and the prayer—and uh, they’ll never…open-ended waiting is so merged with this other processing of being still, being silent, being quiet, which is so counter to the things that we’ve been doing because we’ve been doing an awful lot of running from our pain. When we are still and silent, we begin to, unbeknownst to us in a sense, but we stop running and we are embracing our pain. Now we are giving God time to heal us, because we are opening space for God to come into our life. This is a choice that we are making to honor God and to believe that this is what I should do and this will heal me. So now we feel our inner life moving more into the believing, the hoping, and the loving. Now all this will merge, too. Our journey is sort of like a tapestry. If you look at it year after year, we just keep looking at it from the backside, because we don’t know yet, the other side. So, the backside of the tapestry we’ll see a lot of knots and crossed up stitching and all that, but one day—and this is all due to the grace and mercy and love of God one day it just opens, and it’s just this, Aha! Now we see the other side of the tapestry, which is the face of Christ. We’ve been weaving it all along but we haven’t really, because of our own imperfections, been able to see it that clearly. But if we do our work, if you coming back, if you keep returning, if you intensify your desire, in time—in God’s time—the tapestry is woven and you find yourself abiding all the time and seeing all the time, the face of Christ in the tapestry.