9.9.07 Christian Reflections on The Secret #10 The Secret To Life
WESTMINSTER PULPIT
The Rev. Dr. David Thompson
September 9, 2007 “Christian Reflections on The Secret: #10 The Secret To Life”
Is there a purpose to life? Does God call us to do specific things? What about people who have no sense of calling in life? Will we never be judged? What does the Hebrew and Christian tradition tell us?
Neil Donald Walsh, part of The Secret Team and author of Conversations with God says: “There is no blackboard in the sky on which God has written your purpose, your mission in life. (It is not that.) And all I have to do to really understand what I am doing here, is to find that blackboard and find out what God really has in mind for me. But the blackboard doesn’t exist. So your purpose is what you say it is. Your mission is the mission you give yourself. Your life will be what you create it as, and no one will stand in judgment of it now or ever.”
I have thought a lot about this quotation from Neil Donald Walsh and my conclusion is that it closes something for me which is a huge reality—the love and guidance and protection of God in my own life and in the lives of others. Jack Canfield similarly writes that he grew up with the idea that there was something he was supposed to do, and if he wasn’t doing it God wouldn’t be happy with him.
There are many people I know with no sense of calling in life to whom the words of Donald Walsh and Jack Canfield would give great relief. But there are also people of faith whose understandings and experiences would be very different. Let’s look quickly at the Biblical tradition. Noah in the flood epic is called by God with a specific mission, to save a remnant of life against a global catastrophe. Moses is called by God to lead Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Samuel was called to be a prophet in Israel. David was called by God to become King through Samuel. Solomon was called by God to build the temple at Jerusalem. Jonah was called to preach to Nineveh; something he did not wish to do. Countless other calls came to prophets in the Old Testament. The New Testament continues the call theme. Jesus himself is called to his mission as prophesied by Isaiah to preach good news, to heal the sick and to give his life for love.
St. Paul received his call on the Damascus road. St. Augustine received his call in a garden. Martin Luther received his call to reform the church and declared that call on the church door in Wittenberg. In the modern day Martin Luther King Jr. felt the call of God to set his people free. Winston Churchill felt as if he was “walking with destiny” as he led his people in the Second World War. Countless people feel the call of God in their lives.
People feel called to be pastors, photographers, police, teachers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, secretaries, administrators, salespeople, authors, journalists and business people. Name any profession and occupation and people of faith feel a sense of calling to it. However they work side by side with people who have no sense of calling whatsoever in all these same professions.
Often I have had people come to me asking for God’s guidance in their lives. There are great texts like this one: “In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.” That is a promise that millions of people have believed and acted upon and it has been fulfilled in their lives. There is another more obscure one however that I think is wonderful. It is in Isaiah, the 30th chapter: “When the Lord has given you the bread of suffering and the water of distress, he who is your teacher will hide no longer, and you will see your teacher with your own eyes. Whether you turn to right or left, your ears will hear these words behind you: This is the way follow it.” I believe that this can be the experience of every Christian- to receive guidance and protection from God.
If we look at the Biblical record we discover that no call from God or guidance from God is exactly the same. Moses sees a burning bush, David is chosen by a prophet, Solomon receives a mandate denied to his father to build the Temple of God, Christ withdraws to meditate and pray in the hills, St. Paul sees a light more blinding than the sun and hears the voice of Christ speaking. Joseph in the Bible receives directions from dreams and is given interpretation of dreams for the Pharaoh and saves the Middle East from famine, St. Paul sees visions, Martin Luther receives protection from Saxony against the might of the Roman Catholic Church and part of his mission is to translate the Bible into the language of the common people. His guidance to publish his ninety-fifth theses on the church door at Wittenberg starts the reformation of the Christian Church. Who would have guessed?
In other words there is no blackboard in the sky but that does not mean that God is silent or does not guide us and communicate with us. God is very creative and does not treat us all the same in terms of how He guides us and communicates and that is as it should be for we are all different as snowflakes, precious and even the number of the hairs on our heads is counted according to Jesus.
Let me share with you some of the communications God uses: Dreams and visions: Scripture says:
· “Your young men shall dream dreams and your old men shall see visions.” So pay attention to your dreams.
· Divine coincidence: Often I think God communicates when something comes up in our lives so called “accidentally” but it is just what we need. Advice? Pay attention.
· Answers to prayers: Sometimes God says no, sometimes God says slow, sometimes God says go!
God speaks to us through our bodies. Our bodies frequently know things that our conscious mind does not. We need to pay attention to how we feel. A great book on this is Power Versus Force, by David Hawkins M.D.
· God speaks to us in our hearts: Sometimes we know things at the heart level that we cannot express verbally, we just know.
One of the ways to open this form of communication is to love ourselves completely. A useful exercise to use daily, particularly if we have been beaten down by life, is to say hundreds of times daily “I love myself”. That is a healing affirmation. Let’s remember that the greatest commandment is to love God self and neighbor and none of those loves is a possibility without the other two. God is love, so when God wants to communicate with us we have to be on the love frequency to hear God.
One further point: God may ask us to do something hard. Jesus did not want to die but he felt that this was something God wanted him to do. It was a turning point in history as was the death of Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi or many a saint and martyr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a premonition that he was going to die. He even bought artificial flowers for his wife because he knew that one day soon he would not be able to wire fresh flowers to her.
Jonah did not want to preach to Nineveh and it took a shipwreck and a great fish to convince him that this was the will of God. These stories are in the Bible for us to learn from and the learning is surely this. It is better to be on purpose and have our lives drenched in meaning so that when it is our time to set them down we can hear from our Lord and Master: “Well done thou good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of thy Lord.”
Now back to The Secret. The Secret is I believe right when it intuits that Joy is guidance from God. Joy, love and happiness are part of the guidance system that God uses. If it doesn’t feel right and you are not ready to do something wait: When the student is ready the teacher will appear. The Secret is right in my view when it talks about finding something that resonates with our hearts and that something will draw into our lives more of that good. It is so important to follow our bliss. It is so important to open ourselves to the abundance of the universe. I love the metaphor of abundance where we stand at the edge of the ocean and our choice is to use a bucket or a pipeline and know that there is plenty for everyone. Small thinking produces the results of small thinking. Abundance thinking opens the infinity of the universe into our consciousness and into our hearts. As The Secret says,” it is time for us as a species to embrace our magnificence.” It is true that God created the whole world for all God’s creatures and that we have a special place in it as God’s co-creators. We have a responsibility and a celebration. God loves us. It is true that the earth turns on its axis for all life that the birds sing not only for themselves not only to praise their Maker, but also for all those who are fully awake and conscious. The birds sing for us too! The truth is in the world to set us free. We are heirs to the Kingdom of peace, love and hope. We are to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect.
What we think about comes about. What we sow we reap. Whatsoever things we pray for we are to believe that we have them already and they shall be ours. There is a Great loving God who knows everything about us in particular, whose goodness knows neither measure nor end. As the old obscure hymn says: “How good is the God we adore, Our faithful and unchangeable friend, Whose love is as great as his power and knows neither measure nor end.”
My father’s family had a tradition. Every time that something good happened they would gather around the piano and sing: “How good is the God we adore Our faithful unchangeable friend, Whose love is a great as his power and knows neither measure nor end.” They used it for every celebration. When my grandfather got a raise they would sing. When my father passed his pharmacy degree they sang. When my uncle who was very badly burned by an incendiary grenade and hovered between life and death for months, on the day that the family was told that he would recover, they sang. The tradition carried over into our family and when my sister graduated as Valedictorian we sang. When I received my doctorate we sang. When my mother recovered from a serious illness we sang. When my father was promoted to Director of Advertising we sang. When he got his pipe organ degree we sang.
In 1974, on Mother’s day, my father died. He was a wonderful man and I loved him very deeply. I was playing the organ for a church service at the time the news came. After the service was over I took the call and was told that my father had died from a massive heart attack. I was inconsolable. Why? I asked God. Why? He had so much to look forward to. There had been no warning. I will always remember standing beside the grave and watching my father’s casket being lowered. Nothing on earth could comfort me. It was all wrong.
The pastor, a dear man of God, was saying the old words of comfort which were to me meaningless. Suddenly he started on this obscure hymn: “How good is the God we adore, Our faithful unchangeable friend, Whose love is a s great as his power and Knows neither measure nor end.”
And I knew suddenly it was God at work. Out of the blue there came this immense wave of comfort from a very long process of conditioning. And what a long preparation for that comfort to arrive on that very day when nothing else would have made any impression upon me. I knew then that this death was alright and that something good had happened to my father! He was with that Unchangeable Friend!
Afterwards, curious, I asked the pastor where he got the old hymn from. He said “Oh I got it a couple of weeks ago and I thought it might be good for a funeral…Yeah? Oh Yes! “How good is the God we adore, Our faithful unchangeable friend, Whose love is as great as his power and knows neither measure nor end.” “When the Lord has given you the bread of suffering and the water of distress, He who is your teacher will hide no longer, and you will see your teacher with your own eyes and you will hear these words behind you. This is the way!”
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