When deeds and words are in accord, the whole world is transformed. Zhuangzi
In the world of cyber security, there exists a device known as a firewall. The firewall sits between the outside world and a company’s informational resources, sniffing every atomic particle of traffic asking to be let inside. It trusts nothing without examination. It is incessantly on guard, executing thousands of rules aimed at keeping out the bad and letting in only the good.
But as good as it is, the bad actors on the outside are sometimes better, and eventually, a Trojan horse slips through and brings down the business.
You and I have our own firewall. We are incessantly alert, trusting no one and no news without careful examination. We cannot afford to allow anyone or anything inside that has any intentions beyond our best interests. Beyond truth. Beyond love.
Like many businesses, we have been burned. We have allowed news inside that we later discover to be false. We have allowed people inside who we later realized just wanted to use us and then discard us.
All these experiences convince us to harden our firewall. To the point where we even keep out truth. Where we even prevent anyone from coming inside because we are afraid that their motives and intentions are malicious.
The end result is confusion and loneliness. Skepticism. Mistrust. We become increasingly jaded. That firewall becomes a shield we carry, and it grows heavier and heavier until we can barely move through life at all.
For those of us who need truth and love, we are too afraid to let it in. For those of us offering it, we find it increasingly difficult to get past those overreactive firewalls.
There is only one way to deliver the payload of truth and love that will make it through these hardened defenses: a synthesis of words and actions devoid of selfish motives and replete with a longing to see the well-being of the recipient.
Today, we will encourage you how to relax your firewall to receive this payload – and how to be that payload for those in desperate need of it.
Source Scripture
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The world beneath us spins in circles
And this life makes us twist and turn and sway
But we were made for more than rhythm with no reason
By the one who moves with passion and with grace
As He dances over all that He has made
Stephen Curtis Chapman
We all have a profound longing to experience being – that nearly indescribable essence – that rush – of ecstasy as our soul within aligns and connects with the body and its brain without and all that we are cannot help but erupt in joy. Bliss. Wonder. Awe. We feel worthy. We feel whole. We feel alive. We feel ourselves. And we dance.
But we are impatient. And shallow. And we begin to confuse being with the fleeting pleasures available to us on the surface. We see money as the power that allows us to purchase an endless supply of amusements. We begin to see people not as fellow beings, but as objects that merely provide, assist, or prevent us from obtaining those thrills. We pursue popularity because, in our surface-level thinking, it validates our worth.
And once we make the conscious choice to pursue pleasure through popularity, power, and prosperity – we harness all of the energies within us into seizing the bounty.
Enter a most woeful irony.
In our obsession with procuring these prizes, we give ourselves over willingly into indentured servitude. The daily grind. The treadmill. The rate race. The hamster wheel. We lose ourselves in grueling work in exchange for the someday spoils. But before we realize it, our lives become the grind. And there we sit, wallowing in the two-fold misery of the burden we willingly accepted and the frustration of failing to find euphoria.
A prolonged quest into these fruitless ventures produces an oppressive fatigue. We become restless. Jaded. And so we turn our attention to anything that can bring escape: staring at a screen, ingesting a substance, purchasing a toy, indulging in sensual encounters, fantasizing what could be instead of relishing what is.
And yet, as we toss and turn in our self-inflicted maladies, there are moments when a whisper of being captures our attention and we catch a glimmer of hope. It might be the wet nose of a puppy nuzzling your ear and asking to play or the unexpected kiss of a loved one on the forehead who has just come from far away to see you. Or the sight of a surprise snowfall through the window on Christmas morning.
Is it possible to capture the essence – the being – we experience in such moments? Can we live in bliss instead of hanging onto mere morsels of memories?
Yes. We were designed to live this way. Let’s explore how.
Source Scripture
The Woman at the Well – Part 2: John 4:27-38
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
The Chosen (Woman at the Well Scene: Watch Episode 8 beginning at 40:10)
It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly. – J.R.R. Tolkien
When someone calls us out for doing something we know is wrong, it hurts. It stings. It hits us where we live.
And the cognitive dissonance that erupts in that moment elicits action. The ego’s impulse? Defend itself with one of its all-too-familiar tactics against the voice of rebuke: muffle, muzzle, discredit, destroy.
In the rush to defend ourselves, however, we would be better served to harness our swelling psychic forces and use them in service of the soul’s deep longing to know truth – even when that truth wounds us.
A rightful rebuke exposes our inner darkness – whether buried unknowingly in our shadow or in plain sight but hopefully hidden from others by some cunning veneer.
And that darkness within us is the true source of the indignation we channel toward the rebuke. The very reason we have that reserve of repressed resentment at-the-ready is due to our extant spiritual dissonance over harboring the darkness in the first place.
And so we must choose. We can protect the ego with misdirected energies that assail the rebuke, which only tightens the noose of inner tumult, or we can let those striking words find their intended mark and bring about the illumination that leads to transformation.
Source Scripture
Who is Really In Prison? Matthew 14:3-5; Mark 6:17-20; Luke 3:19-20
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Overcome us that, so overcome, we may be ourselves: we desire the beginning of your reign as we desire dawn and dew, wetness at the birth of light. C.S. Lewis
We rarely present ourselves as we are to others. Instead, we produce a carefully crafted facade designed to impose one or more of the following on the truth. Limitation. Concealment. Obfuscation. Fabrication. We do this out of fear that the whole truth of who we are would surely earn us immediate rejection.
Over time, this habit of cloaking the truth becomes second nature. We graduate from hiding the things we have already done and move on to stealthily planning ahead to doing things we know we can keep hidden in the dark based on our diploma.
On rare occasions some outside agent may confront us and attempt to shine light into that darkness. Our response is almost always fight or flight. But there is a third choice: enlightenment.
Welcome to one of those rare occasions. The goal of today’s episode is to allow the divine light of truth to confront you. To allow it to pierce the darkness, overcome fears of exposure, and offer the exhilarating immersion of your soul in the freeing light of truth.
Let the confrontation – and the immersion – begin.
Source Scripture
Love Like So: John 3:1-21
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Recommended TikTok User: @PonderingWorshipper
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Mahatma Ghandi We too often fall prey to the delusion that our identity is rooted in doing something uniquely or supremely that sets us apart from – or above – everyone else.
Such a foundational fallacy can lead us into a lifetime of anxiety and frustration and failure. The few who do manage to clamber to the apex of this approach to identity become to us a dangling carrot that perpetuates this perversion of who we are and who we are meant to be. And meanwhile, those on top of the world looking down on the rest of us find themselves yet unsatisfied and searching for more.
This strategy is doomed to fail, because it is rooted in the centrality of the ego and its expectation that the world gravitate towards it. Happiness, the ego insists, comes only when things outward flow inward.
And yet the soul – our very ground of being – is never satisfied by what comes from without. It, as we have seen culminating in previous episodes, finds identity only in opening itself to divine presence and allowing that to flow outward to others.
Today, we are going to place these two strategies side by side to see how and from where they originate, what influences us to choose one over the other, and where they ultimately lead.
The goal today is to leave you with your true identity revealed and with safeguards in place to avoid being lost to one of the greatest tragedies you could face in this life: identity theft.
Source Scripture
Who are You? John 1:19-28
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Our nature consists in motion. Complete rest is death – Blaise Pascal.
When Galileo asserted that the earth was not the center of the universe but in fact moved around the sun, he was convicted of heresy by the church, forced to recant, and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life.
“And yet, it moves,” Galileo would whisper about the earth, despite the threat of even harsher punishment. It took years for all of humanity to awaken to the truth.
The Universe was formerly seen as man saw himself – as within, so without. I am the center. All must revolved around me. But the truth became plain through Galileo’s telescope – as above, so below. I am not the center. I am in motion, along with others, around something much bigger than myself. Something full of radiance. Warmth. Light. Life.
Though the outward struggle to believe Galileo’s truth no longer exists, the inward struggle to relinquish the ego as the center endures.
How we see ourselves determines how we see the world. As within, so without. And how we see and accept the truth determines whether we know ourselves. As above, so below.
If we allow the truth to penetrate us, we will live freely and animated, centered in the soul. But if we refuse, we will stagnate and wither.
Source Scripture
When You See It: Matthew 2:1-12
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate. Albert Schweitzer
Kindness is a divine force that moves people. Grace, a radical form of kindness, transforms.
Formally defined, kindness is intentional goodwill freely offered to another without an expectation of reciprocity. Grace is the demonstration of unmerited kindness, often in such a way that it involves great risk or is offered to someone undeserving.
The ego-centered life wrestles with kindness. It is cautious, determined to seek a return on its investment – if not from the recipient, then from a tax deduction or boost in reputation or the like.
The ego even has trouble with receiving kindness, because it lives in suspicion of its obligations to return the favor. Each ego fears the expectations of the other.
And if kindness is rare, grace is impossible to the ego, because it sees no opportunity for return at all. To the ego, grace is nonsensical madness.
The soul-centered life thrives on grace because it is a natural tributary of the river of divine presence that flows from the God of the Universe through us and outward to others.
Today we will see multiple examples of amazing grace that invite us not only to observe, but to participate.
Source Scripture
The Birth of Grace: Luke 2:1-7
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. – Author Unknown
Grasping this – and learning to live by its truth – is what we’ll call soul-centering.
An ego-centered life is like a black hole – everything is pulled towards itself. Nothing escapes. Not even light. It’s pure darkness.
A soul-centered life is more like a star – everything is radiating outward. There is only warmth. And light.This is how we’re meant to live.
Source Scripture
An Angelic Encounter: Luke 1:5-25
For Further Study
Living from the Center: Galatians 5:16-18
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist – each song correlates to an episode.