Finding Your Way

Josh Reeves shares his message, Finding Your Way. Spiritual living isn’t about following a way or the way. It’s about making your own way in awareness that a Divine creative power goes with you.

Whether you’re lost, stuck, or perfectly content, there is an underlying rhythm of Divine nature always present. Embracing our uniqueness, trusting in what unveils our path, and embodying what it teaches us along the way—we make our way with Spirit and Spirit with us.

Transcript

Our topic today is finding your way and I want to go right into step one which is about knowing that you're blessed.

If you want to find your way on the spiritual path it begins by accepting the blessing of life itself.

A lot of us were very aware of what might seem like the curses in our lives.

The challenges,

The problems,

And this could be pragmatic because it can help us know where we are.

It can help us understand a little bit about how we got to where we are but those challenges and those problems will never point you to where you want to go.

They'll never point you to where your heart is meant to be.

It's only when we are able to identify the sacred in ourselves and all around us,

Even if the only blessing we recognize is being alive itself,

That it begins that pathway of spiritual adventure.

I've made part of my spiritual practice this year to once a month write a prayer trying to accumulate all the wisdom of the Mile High congregation and here's the one for April.

My life is abundant in good things,

Connections that inspire me,

Work that rewards and challenges me,

A way of self-care that balances me,

Money to invest in mine and my family's well-being.

My life is abundant in good time,

Space to create and to listen for God's joy,

Dedicated hours to being fully present.

There is no hurry.

My life is abundant in good love,

Food that nourishes my body,

The words I share with others uplift and admire,

The words I take to heart are of affection.

My life is filled with play and silence.

My days are filled with right practice and open to magic.

My life is abundant and so it is.

And all of this month,

And I believe what I wrote there,

But I will believe this most of the time.

There are times where I may not believe this so much and this is where those great words of John Wooden come to mind,

That wouldn't we be so much happier if we magnified not our disappointments but our blessings.

To always hold and remember that blessing of life and to know that it has a creative action in our lives,

That when we're aware of that blessing,

It is done unto us.

It builds momentum and it creates and inspires.

I am so blessed.

Are you?

I am so blessed in my life.

I am so blessed to get to do what I love for a living,

So blessed to be a lead minister at Mile High Church,

So blessed that I'm married to someone who we knew each other since we were teenagers.

So good to have that familiarity for better or for worse.

So grateful to have a beautiful son that's transitioning into adulthood,

So blessed to have my beautiful five-year-old daughter Nancy June,

So blessed.

But maybe this is true for you too,

Sometimes I forget how blessed I am and it's when I forget that blessing that I get off track,

That I get off my path.

And it's so important to get back there,

To recognize for me that when I really see my life truly,

I'm the most blessed person I know.

And if you leave here with anything today,

I hope it's whispering to yourself,

Saying I'm the most blessed person I know.

And if you aren't feeling that way,

I challenge you to look a little bit more deeply at your life and to consider that maybe you're not seeing it well enough or listening well enough for those connections,

For those messages that speak in words and from our hearts.

I'm the most blessed person I know.

If you believe that,

Will you say that with me?

I'm the most blessed person I know.

It's interesting,

As blessed as I am,

I didn't write up in any way what those blessings would look like for me.

I didn't grow up wanting to be a minister.

Even as a minister,

I never would have set out the path to be a lead minister at Mile High Church,

This wonderful church in our movement.

April and I knew each other for ten years or so before we started getting serious.

We knew our exes really well.

I never dreamed of adopting a son and Nancy June was never on my vision board.

The Rolling Stones tell us you can't always get what you want,

But if you try sometime,

You might just find you get what you need.

Douglas Adams said,

I may have not wound up where I intended to go,

But I think I've wound up where I needed to be.

And it's in that needed to be that I think we really feel the blessing of life.

That higher life than just our own consciousness,

Which sometimes knows what we need better than we do and can provide it in incredible ways.

Recognize that blessing that is life and open your heart each day to receive it a little more further and it will further you into the direction of living the life that you want to live.

As Ernest Holmes prays,

I now know how to plan my life and direct my path because it's God is doing this for me by doing it through me.

There's no uncertainty or confusion.

The Divine Spirit always knows what to do and how to do it.

So I am never without guidance in the successful achievement of my good desires.

My every thought,

Act,

And purpose is guided by this wisdom.

The first step to finding your way is knowing you're blessed.

The second step is doing what you love.

Identifying what you love to do and doing it with clarity.

And I'm going to argue today,

Making sure even if it's not what you spend the majority of your time on,

Making sure what you love is right at the center of your life.

Not only will you be doing what you love,

But doing what you love creates more.

It draws and attracts you to where you're meant to be and it draws what's meant to be back to you.

The great Frederick Buechner said that your purpose,

Your calling,

Is that place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet.

What is your deep gladness?

The world's hunger,

It will always be fluid.

It will always be changing.

It could be a cause greater than yourself.

It could be a person that shows up right in front of your face.

We always want to be ready for what the world is hungry for and realize the key to fulfilling that hunger is practicing your deep gladness,

Your deep joy.

Do you know what your deep gladness is?

I asked a couple of mile hires.

I asked my daughter,

Nancy June Reeves.

She wanted to make sure I said Nancy June Reeves when I asked permission to share what she shared because she didn't want any other Nancy to get confused.

And she shared with me that her deep gladness is going on vacation and meeting new friends.

I love that,

That sense of adventure and who we meet along the way.

I asked someone a few years older than Nancy June,

Colleen Stevens,

A beloved Mile High member for roughly 50 years.

There you are over there,

Colleen.

Say hi to everybody.

And you shared with me that you discovered your deep gladness when you left some challenging life circumstances in Utah to move to Colorado.

And the realization it maybe took a while to have that you weren't running away from something,

But you were running into what was meant to be for you.

Your relationship with your husband and the way that you've blessed this incredible Mile High Church as I know it's blessed you in all of your many decades of mentorship and upliftment and prayerfulness here,

All the great things you've done.

Let's hear it for her.

Appreciate you sharing,

Colleen.

We love it.

Appreciate you.

So know that deep gladness.

Know what you love to do and make sure you're making the time to do it.

That's a mistake that a lot of us do is we see this thing that we love as a hobby.

It's compartmentalized over here.

But when we can make it the center of our lives,

It gives that creative momentum that attracts us to where we want to be.

Every once in a while I will have someone ask me,

Josh,

When did you get the calling to be a minister?

And my answer is that I'm still waiting on the phone call.

I definitely had a deep need for spiritual community and so being a minister is good for that.

I sometimes wonder if I wasn't a minister if I'd go to church.

It's something that makes me get up and go every week.

But the real truth is that becoming a minister for me was learning to recognize what was already so.

Learning to recognize what was already so.

I shared earlier this year that I came into this teaching as a teenager in Huntington Beach and there was a teen group there and church meant to me at that time sanctuary,

Sacred space.

It meant an honest,

Safe place to tell the truth.

And this was the mid-90s so a kid might be coming out to themselves for the first time.

Or a teenager might be sharing a trauma that they experienced that they had never shared with anyone else.

Or someone might be sharing something that's true at the core of their being but they feel it's too corny to say,

An acknowledgment of themselves or someone else.

And I knew I wanted to do something with that.

I wanted to create sanctuary and try to be sanctuary for other people to tell their truths.

The teen leaders got me into classes and that was great and at some point there was a story about me that was in a Science of Mine magazine fundraising letter and it was read by a minister in Escondido who invited me to come and share with the congregation.

His name was Lloyd Barrett.

This was about 1997.

I would look him up a couple years later and he had come to Mile High Church to minister as well.

Many of you know Lloyd well.

And then I had a minister,

Dr.

Peggy Price,

Who was so lovely and crazy enough to give me the Sunday night service at the Huntington Beach Church.

And you can see a picture of me about 20 years old.

The people didn't take me too seriously because they made that poster of me,

A 14-year-old,

Of me to hang behind me.

And every time I give a talk I always say to myself,

Who the hell do you think you are?

To get up and share with people.

Now when I look at that picture I definitely think,

Who the hell does he think he is?

But the spiritual law of Steve Martin and success applies.

Martin said,

Despite a lack of natural ability,

I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity,

Naivete.

The fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

I remember giving that first talk and standing in the line and there was a woman that came up to me and she said,

I didn't quite understand a word you said but the way you said it.

Mixed bag,

Mixed bag.

So for me it was simply the courage and the willingness to recognize that ministry was what I was already doing.

You don't have to be great at what you love.

You just have to trust it.

It could be a love for people and having a greater focus on acknowledging people,

Making connections,

Letting them know that you see them.

It could be a way of art that you like to practice that just gives you that energy and sense of love and life that helps you do your job better,

Helps you love your family better.

It could be just reading,

Reading books and being prepared and willing to share the wisdom you share.

That's what set Ernest Holmes,

Our founder,

On the path of ministry.

He was interested in being in theater and entertainment and he was a strong spiritual person.

He was reading metaphysical books,

Especially one by Thomas Chord and a co-worker said,

Well why don't you come over and speak to a group of us about what you're reading.

And he did that and ten years later or so he's starting our church.

Joseph Campbell,

During the Great Depression,

Didn't know what he wanted to do with his life.

He played some saxophone,

He'd been a track star,

And he just huddled up in a cabin in the woods and read and read and read and read.

He said that's how he always said he used to meditate,

But he underlined sentences.

And it was this for him where he discovered his bliss,

Where he got that phrase,

Follow your bliss.

And he,

Like Holmes,

Would become a great synthesizer of mythology and religion.

He said that he would always keep a dollar bill in his drawer during those times and he would say to himself,

As long as I have that dollar bill,

I'll be okay.

Identify your deep gladness and how you can practice it with greater clarity and meaning in your life.

You know,

A great way to know if you're on the right path is to look to your relationships.

And I would ask you the question today is what are the relationships in your life right now that are helping to initiate you into who you are becoming?

What are the relationships in your life right now that are initiating you into who you want to become?

There are always those people in our lives that will see us for who we used to be.

These are your good old friends,

People that keep us humble and keep us down to earth.

Then there are those people in your life who see you for who they want you to be or need you to be.

This can be your kids or hopefully some of you see me as a minister in your life.

This can be a really good thing.

It can be negative too.

But for me those relationships which are our best and most valuable are those people who see you for who you are becoming.

Who see you for who you want to be.

These can be existing relationships that evolve over time.

These can be mentors and teachers.

These can be practitioners at Mile High Church.

To me that's that basic principle of what they're all about is holding a truth for me I've yet to see or hold for myself in a powerful way.

I'm so grateful to have so many of these initiating relationships here at Mile High Church.

Thank you so much for mentoring and uplifting me into who I say I want to become.

But I hope you have those relationships in your life.

Finding your way is about knowing how blessed you are.

It's about doing what you love.

And it's about that willingness to let go of what it needs to look like.

This is what I found the hardest for people in our teaching.

To let go of the need for the path to look a particular way.

As important as it is to have vision and goals and to know what you want.

It's just as important to be able to see the blessings that grow for you and not miss out on them.

Because all of our paths are going to be unique.

As Joseph Campbell once put it,

Where there is a way or path it's someone else's path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else's way you are not going to realize your potential.

An important saying for me in my life is the map is not the territory.

The map is not the territory.

I love maps.

They help us find our direction.

They can give us all sorts of clues on where to go.

They can help us locate where we are.

And yet we must always remember that the territory is something different.

That there are all sorts of other opportunities that can grow up in the territory.

Opportunities to go different directions if we so choose.

Opportunities to have that divine mind that knows a little better than we do to demonstrate for us.

And if your consciousness is only in the map you'll miss out on what the territory is offering you.

My first couple of years in ministry I would call a failure.

And it was because I was so attached to this map consciousness.

I wanted things to look just like this.

And I started a ministry that was focused on young adults and agnostics.

And I started a church at a comedy club.

And other people than that started showing up.

And it took me a while to admit it but there was this part of me that resented it a little bit.

I wanted the folks that I ministered to to show up in just a particular way.

I wanted them to look just like this.

And I wanted my ministry to look just like that.

And none of that happened.

And it was kind of a crisis of faith for me.

I went broke.

I had to close down the ministry.

I was blessed enough to get an assistant minister job in San Diego.

And I was struggling with that.

Why is God not showing up the way that I'm telling her to?

And I remember reading some Viktor Frankl and God spoke through him to me with a powerful statement.

And it said this,

Don't aim at success.

The more you aim at it and make it a target,

The more you are going to miss it.

For success,

Like happiness,

Cannot be pursued.

It must ensue as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

Again,

I'm not saying don't want to be successful.

It's good to have that vision.

It's good to have those goals.

And yet for me,

The most powerful thing that I could do in that moment was take down the vision board and just focus on being the best me I could be.

Focus each day on being the best minister I could be.

And it wasn't only in a few months later that I got a call to go be the minister in Seal Beach.

And it was five years after that that I got a call from Roger Thiel and I get to be here with you now.

All of that for me demonstrated,

Not from want and desire,

But from focusing on bringing the best of myself to my life.

And it provided for me an incredible important lesson about ministry and life that I don't choose who I minister to,

Who I minister to chooses me.

I don't choose always who I love,

Who I love chooses me.

I don't always choose who my friends are,

Who my friends are choose me.

And that's part of that blessing of life,

To move through your path and be pleasantly surprised at the incredible opportunities that come your way.

So it's wonderful to know where you want to go and yet to trust the guidance of the path to lead you where you need to be.

There's a wonderful interaction that happens in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland where Alice is lost in Wonderland and she's asking the Cheshire Cat where she should go.

Would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,

Said the cat.

I don't much care where,

Said Alice.

Then it doesn't matter which way you go,

Said the cat.

So long as I get somewhere,

Alice added as an explanation.

Oh,

You're sure to do that,

Said the cat,

If only you walk long enough.

And the spiritual message in this for me is if you don't know where you want to go,

Don't worry,

Any path will lead you there.

But if you know what you really want in your heart to experience,

Not necessarily all the details but what it means to truly live a life fully loving and fully loved,

To live a courageous life,

To live a life in service to a power greater than you are,

To know and understand as much of your own being and about this thing called life as possible,

Don't worry,

Any path will get you there as well.

I developed a little saying for my life,

I don't know where I'm going but I think I know how to get there.

I don't know where I'm going but I think I know how to get there.

What I mean by that is to trust in your own virtues,

Trust in the sincerity of your own voice,

Trust in the courage to speak up and to stand up for yourself,

Trust in that blessing of life that has been given to you and if you live up to it,

It will demonstrate for you incredible things.

If you want to get off of your path,

Betray your virtues,

Inhibit and repress yourself and your voice,

Choose fear over courage,

Dismiss and deny that blessing of life,

That's the surest way to get off of finding your way in life's adventure.

But if you can remember these things and practice them,

It's a wonderful thing because you don't have to do it by yourself.

This magnificent creative life is working for you all of the time.

Our lives are never going to pause and look at us and say,

Where do you want to go?

Our lives are like the flow of a river.

They're like an incredible flow of a river that just needs our participation to take us and uplift us and bring us right to those experiences and life passages where we need to be,

To bless us,

To uplift us and to give us that sense of home that isn't in place but is in being and living the life that we want to live.

Reviews

Wow! Thank you so much! Do much!! This was exactely the speach I needed to hear! May you be blessed