Moving Through It

As life constantly renews itself like the seasons of the Earth, we are called to renew our faith. The cycle of living takes us through many phases, and the one who uses those phases to deepen into faith may find they become easier to manage and bloom through. Michelle Medrano presents this Sunday Message.

Transcript

Today we're talking about a new faith,

The opportunity to deepen and renew our faith in life and in ourselves.

About 15 years ago,

I was married to a wonderful man named Brad,

And he was taking care of our yard and the plants in our yard.

And there was this beautiful,

Abundant green plant that was just outside of our bedroom window that I spent a lot of time looking at and meditating upon.

It was growing on a trellis.

And one day as I left for work,

Brad said to me,

I'm going to trim back that plant a little bit.

Some of the flowers are getting a little brown,

And I think it needs a trim.

And I said,

Great.

And I came back from work,

And he had cut every leaf off of that plant.

That's why we are no longer married.

I'm just kidding.

But it shocked me.

I was stunned to come home and find my sacred,

Beautiful plant completely decimated and cut so far back in life.

And I couldn't believe that this is what had happened.

And I feel like this is what happens to us in life sometimes.

That we're just going along,

Living our life,

Doing our thing,

Living just fine.

And suddenly something in life cuts back dramatically at times.

What we're experiencing,

Conditions,

Circumstances suddenly disappear.

Things that we thought we could count on forever suddenly are no longer there.

People that we thought would be here forever with us are gone as they move away or they move on to the next life.

Things change rapidly and in a fast experience that sometimes can catch us for a loop because we weren't expecting it.

We watch as conditions in the world shift and change,

As nature takes its course.

And sometimes a storm,

A tornado,

A hurricane,

Some activity of nature will sweep through a town or an area,

And suddenly everything that was there is swept away and people are swept away and lives are changed.

And of course,

We see things that are happening like in Ukraine right now.

They're happening in other parts of the world,

But all over our screens right now we are seeing the devastation of towns that once were thriving,

Being devastated with violence and people having to flee by the millions from their homes and start a completely different life.

We see that life can sweep through our experiences and change things forever.

And I wonder,

Why is this?

And I know that there are times when it happens either to me or I'm watching it happen in the landscape of the world that it feels discouraging,

That I don't know what to make of it.

I don't know what meaning to give of it.

I don't know how to keep my faith in the midst of that.

And I want to talk today about how it is we can keep our faith.

Our founder,

Ernest Holmes,

Talks a lot about how life is a circle of evolution.

He says,

We believe in an eternal upward spiral of existence.

This is what Jesus meant when he said,

In my Father's house are many mansions.

And in the midst of this kind of experience of life sweeping away,

I read what our founder said and I just feel even more skeptical and discouraged.

Like,

What does he mean by that?

Am I going to have to live through that the rest of my life with things being swept away like this?

And I think the answer might be yes.

I think the answer might be that's part of living.

If we look at our journey with a little perspective and look back upon the past,

Our individual journey and our collective journey,

We see that it appears as though Ernest Holmes might be right.

That we live a life where we're walking along in our journey of living and things happen and they're devastating.

They can take us down.

And in that circle that Holmes is talking about,

Every time one of those moments happens for us or someone we love or a group of people we care about,

There's this moment where we can stop and in a way kind of be frozen in our pain,

Frozen in the suffering,

Frozen in the fear,

Frozen in the I don't know what to do.

And yet if we look back,

I suspect that every moment of triumph that we can see ourselves having moved through was having that moment on the cycle of experience where something within us eventually,

Sometimes after a long period or sometimes rather quickly,

Said I need to move on.

I need to keep moving forward.

I need to grow from this.

I need to evolve.

I need to reach deep within myself for something that can help me move forward and gather my strength and gather my faith and step forward because I'm no longer willing to be stuck or to be stopped or to feel held back in my life by this condition that has occurred.

That every human experience,

Every story begins with someone like Pippin saying I gotta find my corner of the sky.

I've gotta step forward.

I've gotta do something.

And even though I was very angry with Brad about cutting back that plant,

He kept telling me it's gonna grow back more beautiful.

It's gonna grow back more beautiful.

And you know what?

He was right.

It grew back more abundant and the flowers were more beautiful.

And I think that this is the human experience too.

With every one of those moments where life sweeps things away,

There is that challenge and that recovery and there's the beauty that we embrace as we walk that pathway of living and learning and growing and dealing with what's in front of us that deepens us,

That enriches us and that builds a deeper faith within us.

And that faith is a faith that says I can do this.

I can be this human on this path.

I can recover.

I can grow.

I can even thrive in the midst of this challenge.

Because we see that we humans can do this too.

I think that the greatest and strongest place to be with regards to faith is not to be one of those people who gathers faith around me so that I can keep the negative things from happening,

Have the best positive thoughts so that nothing bad ever occurs.

Because I don't know if you've experienced or noticed,

But no human has ever had that kind of life.

Not a single one.

Rather,

I think the faith that we're seeking to experience through this cycle is no matter what occurs,

There's a strength,

There's a fortitude,

There's a power,

There's a wisdom within me that can move through it,

Be with it,

And can transcend and be triumphant in it.

There was this beautiful meme I found a number of months ago online.

It's by a group called Positivity on Life.

And I loved it and I forgot to record it.

And I went searching for it for this talk.

And thank you to Reverend Michelle Scavetta who reposted it recently,

Just for me and for you,

I'm sure.

Because here's what it says.

Faith doesn't always take you out of the problem.

Faith takes you through the problem.

Faith doesn't always take away the pain.

Faith gives you the ability to handle the pain.

Faith doesn't always take you out of the storm.

Faith calms you in the middle of the storm.

So we are here today to explore how to continue to develop a new faith.

When life has stripped things away from us,

How do we step into that new faith?

And there are three ways that I think we can most effectively do this and look at this dance of faith,

This journey of faith together,

And bloom in the midst of it.

The first one has to do with something I know I've experienced.

I don't know if you've experienced it,

Where you've had a challenge in life and you notice the challenge and you see the challenge and you work on the challenge and you appear to get through the challenge and feel so much better having gotten through the challenge and then you get triggered so badly that you think you never did anything at all about the challenge.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one.

I was really concerned that might be the case.

I had a very profound dance with this.

I'd say the most challenging relationship in my life was that of my relationship with my father.

My parents were married very young.

They had me at a very young age as teenagers and they were not well equipped to be teenagers,

To be parents.

So they struggled.

But add to this mix that my father had a family history of alcoholism and violence and rage and so I was raised in a home where there was this man in the home who could be very charming and fun and funny and intelligent until he wasn't.

And when he wasn't,

He was angry and scary and loud and threatening and violent.

And I grew up for the first 14 years of my life in this kind of household.

And what I noticed is that I protected my brother and sister to the best of my ability from this anger and rage.

But what would happen to me when he would start to go into that mode is I would just freeze.

Everything about me would just freeze.

I couldn't speak.

I didn't want to move.

I would just freeze until it passed,

Hoping that it would pass.

And when I came here and discovered a teaching and discovered a faith that could help me to deal with the pain of that past and the trauma of that,

It was a brand new day for me.

And I,

As you know,

Many of you who've been around for a long time know that I jumped into classes and did everything I could here in this community to support myself in healing.

I had a practitioner.

I got prayer support every chance I could.

I worked on myself diligently and I went to therapy and I did group therapy and I did everything I could.

My mother supported me to get as healed as I possibly could and I was walking through my life as a young adult thinking,

I got this handled.

I did it.

And I was seeing the results of it in improved relationships.

I was seeing the results of it in improved self-esteem and confidence in my life.

And then one day,

One day,

I went to run an errand for my mother and I walked into a building and I didn't think anybody else was there and I walked into a room where a therapist,

A male therapist was working with someone and I startled the two of them and the therapist got up and started screaming and yelling at me just like my father used to.

And I froze.

I froze to the same extent that I had frozen as a child.

And I remember closing the door and walking away and thinking,

I haven't healed anything.

I thought I healed it all.

And I came back here to this place of respite and I went to my practitioner,

The beloved Sadie Turtleot and I talked with her about it.

And Sadie helped me see that in this cycle,

This spiral of life that Holmes talked about,

That there's always the opportunity to deepen in our healing.

And so what I discovered is that our heart,

Our soul,

Our healing journey can be like layers,

Like an onion.

When I say that,

I think of that cartoon character Shrek who used to say,

Ogres are like layers.

The layered effect happens in the healing journey.

That we walk a path of healing and we feel the smoothness of it and underneath there still may be more work to do.

And that we're not broken,

Defective,

Or faithless,

Or useless.

Nothing's wrong if in that journey of healing we get triggered every once in a while.

That what I learned from that incident and what I learned from Sadie and what I learned through doing the work is that it was a call from my soul to continue becoming the faith-filled being that I was wanting to be in the world.

It was a call to deeper forgiveness.

It was a call to a deeper walk in faith.

And I,

Thanks to her support,

Met that faith,

Met that opportunity and did deepen that faith to the extent that the next time I saw my father and he started to try to bully me,

I wasn't mean to him.

I wasn't rude to him.

But I was clearly a new person.

I had a new faith in myself that could say,

No.

You will not speak to me that way.

No.

And he never did again.

It ended.

And it was about,

Yes,

Thank goodness.

It was about that claiming of faith in myself,

Faith in my journey.

So sometimes I feel like we are challenged because we are on that spiral and we get stuck again by our reactions and our triggers and our traumas.

And the work is to continue to use our faith in ourselves,

Our faith in our soul to deepen,

Go deeper,

To see those triggers as an opportunity,

An invitation.

The solution here is self-compassion.

It's loving ourselves enough to say that experience that just triggered me is calling me into deeper work.

It's not showing me something's wrong.

It's calling me into that something is right.

That I'm now ready to be more filled with the faith of who and what I am.

We are filled with layers of healing and wholeness and our soul is on this beautiful journey.

The second realm of this faith that we can walk in,

This new faith,

Is that if we can continue to have faith in ourselves through those moments,

We can also foster a deepened faith,

A new faith for ourselves through the seasons of living.

Through the things that shift and change about life as conditions change,

As we grow older,

As things happen,

As the discoveries and the things we used to do,

We no longer feel called to do,

Can't do,

Won't do,

Don't want to be about anymore.

To feel that and be with that and use those moments and accept that life is filled with seasons.

We're fortunate to live in Colorado where we get to see the four seasons very clearly,

Sometimes all in one day.

So nature is inviting us constantly into this awareness that things will change.

And as the winter unfolds here in Denver,

To be with it and to enjoy the beauty of it,

All the while,

Of course,

Having the faith that spring is going to come.

And when we embrace this kind of faith,

We know that the seasons of our life bring us renewed opportunities to move forward in new ways and to change and transform with that which arises in our experience.

Recently,

I didn't really watch a lot of the Winter Olympics in Beijing,

But there was one little soul who captured my attention,

And that was Michaela Shiffrin.

This world-class skier,

Young woman who I could recite her skiing accomplishments and it would take the whole rest of my talk here because she's gotten gold medals in previous Olympics and all sorts of championships.

And here she is on the slopes in Beijing.

This young woman is skiing and she can't get anything right.

She's falling on her runs.

She's running over the flags,

Which I guess is not very good in that sport.

She was completing races,

But she couldn't get credit for them because she'd either fallen or made so many mistakes,

She couldn't get credit for them.

And there were images of her on television during the Olympics just crying and saying,

I don't know what's going on.

But still,

What I was so taken with was her faith in herself.

Her faith in her training.

Her faith in there's some meaning in this for why I'm here doing this right now.

Some willingness to accept that what she was experiencing was showing her there was potentially a change that needed to happen in her life.

Whether it was changing how she did her sport,

Changing how she did her training,

Or changing what she was doing altogether.

We will see what unfolds for Michaela,

But what was so clear for me was her willingness to stay in her faith about herself,

Even when she faced such huge,

Spectacular,

Widely shown failure.

Most of us are failures that happen.

They don't get put on TV every night for people to see,

But we still feel so frustrated about them and some of them come because they're calling us to have a new faith in ourself to possibly make a change.

To have a change occur in our life.

The solution for this one is self-compassion.

Oh wait,

Deja vu,

I already said that.

But the truth is they're all self-compassion,

Aren't they?

This whole dance of faithfulness is an ongoing invitation for self-compassion and self-love.

And listening to the seasons,

Non-resistance to when it's time to do things differently.

For when it's time to make a change.

For when it's time to let go.

For when it's time to move forward.

And speaking of moving forward,

The next part of building a new faith comes in those times when we consciously choose to make a change and move forward in our life in some meaningful way.

What we get to know and accept,

And I suspect what we've all experienced throughout our life when we've made a choice like this,

Is that there will be obstacles.

There will be things that don't go as expected.

There will be moments when life gets in the way.

There will be moments when we deepen and we're successful.

There'll be moments when we have triumph.

There'll be moments when we don't.

And sometimes in that circle of becoming and living on our faith,

We will stop and be fearful about making a meaningful change for fear of failure,

For fear of even success at times,

For fear in general.

What if,

What if,

What if,

What if?

While all the while our soul is calling us to move forward.

And so a building of a new faith,

A blooming of faith into being is hearing that call and taking that step.

The great Martin Luther King Jr.

Said,

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.

And so we are called and constantly being invited by our own soul,

By life itself,

To take a step forward and to have faith as we hear that part of us that is calling us to do this,

That's saying,

Please,

Let's move forward.

Let's make a change.

Let's do something different.

Let's go in this direction.

Let's go in that direction.

One of my favorite stories about the time that the great master teacher Jesus was alive was the story of the woman touching the hem of his garment.

In Saint Matthew,

They said,

And behold,

A woman who had a hemorrhage for 12 years came up from behind him and she touched the edge of his cloak,

For she was saying to herself,

If I can only touch his garment,

I will be healed.

And Jesus turned around and saw her and said to her,

Have courage,

My daughter.

Your faith has healed you.

And the woman was healed in that very hour.

That story is significant to me because I feel like for us,

Life is broadcasting that message to us constantly.

Have faith.

Your faith has healed you.

And when we listen,

When we take time to listen and build a life that is anchored in the faith we have in ourselves and in our God,

That God presence that is always urging us forward into our next greater yet to be,

When we listen and heed that voice,

It's like touching the hem of that garment.

And life says,

Go,

You did it.

The clarity the woman had on her own to say,

I'm just going to reach out and touch the hem of his,

I'm just going to touch a little bit because the littlest bit in this arena makes the biggest difference.

The littlest willing to step out on faith can make a huge difference for our soul's journey,

For our sense of happiness and fulfillment and joy in life.

And that is why here we teach and talk so much about the ongoing practices of helping us to stay in touch with our faith.

Because we know,

As I've said,

That there will be moments when things will be cut away,

When life will change suddenly.

And the ones of us who have in those moments where life was calm and serene,

Were willing to be about the practices of building our heart,

Our soul,

Our connection to our inner voice,

Our connection to our inner guidance system,

Which is never offline,

A connection with that deep abiding presence within us,

We'll find ourselves always on the greatest ride of our life.

One thing I've discovered recently that has given me great faith that I will share with you is a story out of California,

A grade school in California where the teachers decided to put together a project for the kids.

Ashira Weiss and Jessica Martin were the teachers.

And they decided to put together a phone calling system.

I'm going to have them put the phone number up right now.

I mean,

What church can you go to and they put a phone number up?

For a good time,

Call.

Right there.

It's right there.

But this is a really good time because the kids recorded all sorts of encouraging messages.

So I'm encouraging you to write the number down,

Take a picture of it,

Take a screenshot for those of you who are watching online.

Because when you call in,

You can choose either English or Spanish,

And these little grade school children encourage you.

They say,

You can do it.

The whole class together.

One little boy says,

If you're feeling deflated,

Go do something you love.

You'll feel inflated right away.

And another girl says,

If you're feeling lost,

Go spend your money on ice cream and shoes.

This little child's voice.

Just so uplifting,

So beautiful.

The teachers indicated on the CBS story when they were interviewed,

Which was quite a while ago,

That they had 9,

000 calls and they were stunned that so many people had called.

But it's gone viral now.

Probably because I've been calling 9,

000 times too.

Because I've been discovering that when I feel a little discouraged,

I just call the phone number and they ask you,

Pick one if you need encouragement,

Pick two if you need.

And so you pick whatever number and then some little kid says something beautiful to you.

And it has given me such faith and joy that it's become part of my practice now to listen to these children.

And what I find is that for me,

That allows me to go out into the world ready to walk on that journey and go wherever my life takes me with a sense of joy and faith in myself,

In life,

In us,

And in all that occurs.

I know that it's not always going to be easy.

I know that it's not always going to be fun.

But I know that as long as I can stay connected,

I can feel that joyful sense of faithfulness within me.

And I'd like to close with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson,

The transcendentalist essayist who lived in the 1800s who was a huge inspiration to so many people,

Including our own Ernest Holmes.

This writing is a beautiful one about how to end each day.

Emerson says,

Write it in your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

He is rich who owns the day and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day.

In it well and serenely with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear with its hopes and invitations to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Let us go forth and bloom a new faith together.

Please join me in prayer.

As we breathe in this very breath of life this day,

We celebrate the light,

The love,

And the joy that constantly encourages us,

Energizes us,

And lifts us forward into every step of our journey of living.

We feel the support and the love that is the God presence.

We feel that spiral of living that we have been walking on for eternity.

And we feel that sense of security and faith that has led us right to this point right here right now.

And our life just as it is and just as it isn't filled with the presence of spirit.

Our life in every way that we love it,

In every way that we would choose to change or transform it,

Filled with the very presence that God is.

And we place our faith this day,

Right here,

Right now,

In that same presence that has uplifted us all of our existence and shall continue to do the same through every moment of this day and every day to come.

We place our faith in it for we recognize that in every moment we've had,

A new faith in ourselves has emerged as we've been triumphant,

As we've learned,

As we've grown,

As we've become experts at being alive.

Alive in God,

As God,

Filled with the joyous faith of the ever present reality of this light.

And so we surrender this truth now into the action of that law that makes it so we let it be,

We let it go.

It is done.

And so it is.

Amen.