Thank you Eric Yamani for revitalising our garden!
Grace and Peace to you …
So the other day I was in a meeting. Well actually a couple of meetings. The first meeting was with a person who was the leader of his organisation. A group of us met with him. We had contacted him directly requesting to meet concerning a matter of mutual concern. The meeting began. The meeting ended. All fine.
Then I had another meeting. This second meeting was with different people. During this meeting a person informed us that should we ever want to meet with the leader of the organisation we had met with in the first meeting in the future, we should go through him first.
Okay I thought to myself … we have ourselves a bit of a power struggle going on here.
Then a few days later we had a third meeting. This third meeting included both the leader of the organisation from the first meeting as well as the person who said we must go through him from the second meeting. So I was all eyes on the dynamics between these two – wondering how the power dynamics were going to play out. To my surprise there didn’t seem to be any power dynamics at play between the two of them. In fact just the opposite – they complemented each other throughout.
I was a little confused until all light was shed on the situation by the person from the second meeting who said we must go through him to get to the leader of the organisation. In short, it was more about protocol than power.
I made an assumption based on what I thought was obvious but which in fact was incorrect. Not only did I carry in my mind thoughts about these two people that were not true, but it also influenced how I prepared for the third meeting, namely, less open and more guarded.
This got me thinking how often we may assume to know the reasons for things when in fact we don’t. Making assumptions so often leads to misunderstanding which in turn leads to hurt. As Mr. Wesley said in his “Rules of a Helper: Believe evil of no one unless fully proved; take heed how you credit it. Put the best construction you can on everything. You know the judge is always supposed to be on the prisoner’s side.”
Grace, Alan
“You’ve got it all wrong. You didn’t come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you’ll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of messing up. Often. You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering. But unconditional love? Stop telling that story. Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives. It doesn’t require modifiers, it doesn’t require the condition of perfection. It only asks that you show up. And do your best. That you stay present and feel fully. That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU. It’s enough. It’s PLENTY.”
~ Courtney A. Walsh
