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)
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.