The Power of Divine Love

I’d like to introduce you to my sweet Beagles: Mazzie and Lilly. Please walk with me in your mind’s eye as I share with you our story….This morning, the three of us are walking merrily along my street in our quiet, little town of Upper Sandusky, OH. It’s a beautiful, crisp Fall day. The sky is blue, the colors on the trees are turning yellow and crimson, and the sun is warming us as the morning chill is wearing off. I’ve just had a liberating morning meditation in which I once again remembered I needed to give my ego-mind to God. I had been feeling heavy and didn’t quite understand why. While meditating, it soon occurred to me that, once again, I had been telling myself I needed to figure out how to make everything work on my own. I do that a lot! I have a website to create, a book to write, a business to run, and I still need to get the bills paid and clean the house! It’s always a relief when I realize, once again, I’m not alone, and I don’t have to do this alone! You might imagine then that I’m feeling blissfully free and relaxed as I settle back into this remembering that God’s got this. 

Ahhh! I love that feeling. I’m free and joyful! My pups are walking happily beside me, and I’ve not yet tightened their leashes as we all seem to be so relaxed and carefree. I do, at least, have all four of their leashes wrapped around both hands. I say four because we’ve found it necessary to have two leashes per dog as Beagles are both runners and hunters. Neither would intentionally run away; however, both have been easily lured across the neighborhood by bunnies and squirrels that got their sudden, undivided attention, and led us also running for hours trying to track them as they hunt their prey! 

Of course, I should learn not to let my guard down! Just as I’m relaxing and savoring the bliss of being at one with all that is, both Mazzie and Lilly lunge, in unison, abruptly toward some invisible presence out in front of us. Yikes! They jerk me forward suddenly, pulling me out of my blissful state and back to the world around me. They are not only quick but incredibly strong. Perhaps it was my own inner power that saved me from sprawling forward onto the road beneath me. I was quite surprised to find myself still standing. I quickly pulled all the slack out of their leashes, brought their restraining collars up to give me better control, and breathed a huge thank you of appreciation that the straps around my hands only tightened around me further as they lunged. And then I thought, “Wow, that is truly an excellent metaphor for the stealth and attack of the ego-mind! (Just a point of clarification; when I refer to the ego-mind, I’m referring to any message of fear, judgment, comparison, self-doubt, etc.) “For I can truly be having a blissful moment, feeling at one with God and my truth, and be caught off guard by some trigger of self-judgment that could send me flailing for days across the pavement of my mind. And what safety net, like the tightening leashes, do I have precisely when that happens?  

I frequently have my best conversations with while I’m on my morning walk. Today was no different. I decided to pose the question to my Higher Power. If I had the protection of the leash to tighten more fully around my hands as the dogs lunged, what then can I call upon to secure me to You when my ego-mind threatens to take me down?  Of course, the obvious answer to me is to stop and breathe and check who’s voice I’m listening to. For I know, without a doubt, there are only one of two choices: I can listen to the always judging voice of the ego or the compassionate Voice of . But I was searching for something more like an emergency pull rope….something I can put into place that will automatically pull me in if I’m too far gone to ask which voice is speaking! I know that when the ego-mind gets going, it could be hours to days until I come up for clarification to check out what’s really going on. I really couldn’t think of anything substantial on my own.  So I let go and just breathed. I released my own need to figure it out and trusted it would come. Not more than a second passed when a poem my mother taught me as a teenager began playing in my head: