Praying you are...
Blessed in a way that brings God's presence closer than you have ever known it...
Blessed in a way that assures you of the plans He has for your life...
Blessed in a way that fills your heart with a thousand"thank-yous" for all that His hand will bring your way.
May the Lord continually BLESS YOU with Heaven's blessings as well as with human joys. Psalm 128:5 TLB
Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.” (Luke 6:38 NKJV)  November 4 | Exchanging love |
“...we give love because it was given so freely to us. New frontiers are open to us as we learn how to love. Love can be the flow of life energy from one person to another.” Basic Text, p. 105 ––––=–––– Love given, and love received, is the essence of life itself. It is the universal common denominator, connecting us to those around us. Addiction deprived us of that connection, locking us within ourselves. The love we find in the NA program reopens the world to us. It unlocks the cage of addiction which once imprisoned us. By receiving love from other NA members, we find out—perhaps for the first time—what love is and what it can do. We hear fellow members talk about the sharing of love, and we sense the substance it lends to their lives. We begin to suspect that, if giving and receiving love means so much to others, maybe it can give meaning to our lives, too. We sense that we are on the verge of a great discovery, yet we also sense that we won’t fully understand the meaning of love unless we give ours away. We try it, and discover the missing connection between ourselves and the world. Today, we realize that what they said was true: “We keep what we have only by giving it away.” ––––=–––– Just for today: Life is a new frontier for me, and the vehicle I will use to explore it is love. I will give freely the love I have received. |
Daily Meditation for Saturday 02nd of November 2013
If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
I Corinthians 13:3
We need to experience loving relationships in order to heal and grow. In loving relationships we experience the safety that allows us to face the truth. In loving relationships we experience the support we need to begin to change. And in loving relationships we learn that we are lovable and valuable.
Because we have been wounded in relationships, our instinct is often to run from relationships. We don't want to be hurt again. This leaves an enormous void in our souls. And it is this void which we desperately try to fill with addictions and compulsions of various kinds. This text focuses on two manifestations of religious addiction (compulsive altruism and religiously motivated self-abuse) and sums up the result: I gain nothing. The same could be said of all of our addictions. "I deliver my body to be burned" and "I gain nothing" are an accurate description not only of a particular kind of religious addiction but also of chemial addiction, work addiction, sexual addiction and relationship addiction, as well as many self-abusive compulsions.
We gain nothing for all the time and effort we spend on trying to numb the pain. It does not achieve the desired result. The void remains.
Although loving fellowship may be frightening for us, it is the path to recovery. The vulnerabilities of intimacy may remind us of earlier times of terror in life, but there is no way to recover in isolation. The net result of compulsions and addictions is "I gain nothing." But the net result of recovery is very different. There is something to be gained by all the hard work that recovery requires. Recovery builds in us a capacity to receive love and a capacity to give love to others. And that is a real gain.
May God grant you the courage you need today to pursue loving fellowship.
Lord, you see my guarded heart.
You see the fears that make me run from love.
What I fear is what I want most.
I want to love and to be loved.
Give me courage to open my heart to love today.
Amen.<
Copyright Dale and Juanita Ryan
