This Day Is Just For You

Charlie Kaufman said that for seven billion people in the world, no one is an extra. You are the lead character in your story. In this spirit, we explore the spiritual idea that God made this day just for you—to learn, grow, celebrate, and bring forth the best that’s within you. This Talk is by Josh Reeves.

Please note: This track was recorded live and may contain background noises.

Transcript

So I invite you this morning to entertain the following concept that if you don't believe it's true now,

I hope to convince you of at the end of 25 minutes.

And the concept is this,

God,

Spirit,

Life,

The Universe,

The Divine has made this day just for you,

Just for you.

Every moment,

Every encounter,

Every song you hear,

Every movie you watch,

Everything in your social media feed,

Wonderful and annoying,

Every breath,

Every scene of nature,

Made just for you.

This may at first sound outrageous,

What a narcissistic thing to believe that God made this day just for me.

But I tell you,

It's not about you,

It's about God.

When I deliver a Sunday message,

My goal is to only speak to one person and to hope that everyone thinks it's them.

I think the Divine can work that way too.

God made this day just for you and if you struggle with that idea,

Don't limit God,

That power and that presence and its ability to form and shape meaning in your life.

God made this day just for you,

For your awakening,

For your deepening,

For your inspiration,

For your healing,

For your growth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that each day is a God and that every day is the last judgment.

Not from some dude on a cloud sitting on a throne somewhere,

But of ourselves.

Did I carpe diem or seize the day?

Did I embrace the wisdom and the majesty of each moment?

Did I show up or did I shut down?

Was I a presence for giving and receiving love?

Did I have my moments of awe?

Emerson would share,

To finish the moment,

To find the journey's end in every step of the road,

To live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom.

How's that wisdom going for you?

Are you living that wisdom?

Charlie Kaufman,

A great screenwriter,

Said that for all the 7 billion people in this world,

Not one of them is an extra.

Each is the lead of their own story.

Our teaching,

Religious science,

Has some spiritual backbone to this idea.

Ernest Holmes says that the goal of religious science is to universalize the individual and individualize the universal.

In other words,

The cosmos is this grand,

Vast,

Infinite thing around us,

But is also the truth of who we are within us.

And I don't want to get into that ego trap of saying the fullness of God is in each one of us,

And I believe it is,

But it deserves a certain kind of humble understanding.

But what I will say is the whole of spirit is seeking to realize and know itself in each and every one of us.

The wholeness of life itself desires to experience itself,

To realize itself,

To know itself in you and as you.

You are that important.

Not your sense of self-importance.

You,

The real you,

Are that important.

And this day,

This day the Lord has made,

Is here for each of us if we can step into it with courage,

Transparency,

And the willingness to transform and uplift our lives.

For all of the negative emotions there are out there,

None annoys me more than boredom.

Anyone here ever get bored?

I get bored and I get so mad at myself because I know that I'm living in the universe and the invention of my own stories.

There is no boredom in the day the Lord has made.

Look at this natural world that we live in.

Any of us can drive 15 minutes around a circumference and eat almost any food from any part of the world.

We can have romantic relationships with artificial intelligence on our phones.

We can learn about anything we want at any time.

Bored?

Is there a greater quality of defective experience in getting caught in our own tunnel vision than boredom?

Every once in a while I need a swift spiritual kick in the behind and I always go to Rainer Maria Rilke and I love what he says,

You have to take it in the right spirit.

If your daily life seems poor,

Do not blame it.

Blame yourself.

Tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

For the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

That swift,

Quick,

Spiritual kick in the behind.

To remember this is not the day that I have made.

This is the day that Spirit has made,

A day that has never been like it before,

A sacrament to experience the divine in myself and in all life.

We were in our services meeting a couple weeks ago where we planned these things and our sound engineer Nathan Marshall was there and he often likes to quote scripture and he saw the title of the talk and he called it out,

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will rejoice and be glad in it.

He snickered and said,

Even I know that one.

The great Howard Thurman,

The first great interfaith minister in the United States,

Spiritual mentor to Martin Luther King Jr.

He shared of a woman in his congregation who every morning she would wake up and she would begin her prayer with,

Today is the day the Lord has made,

I will rejoice and be glad in it.

And before she went to bed she would pray and she'd mix it up a little bit.

Today is the day the Lord has made,

I will rejoice and relax in it.

One day she had a bad fall and she went to bed in pain and she declared to herself,

Today is the day the Lord has made,

I will rejoice and cry in it.

I'm not saying the day is going to be easy.

I'm not saying that.

I'm not inviting over sentimentality here.

I'm just saying that in this day is everything we need for our healing,

For our deepening,

For our understanding,

If only we let it.

So in the spirit of Nathan Marshall and this quote from scripture,

I want to play on these words a little bit.

And the first thing that I want to say today is today is the day the Lord has made,

I will not rush through it.

Today is the day the Lord has made,

I will not rush through it.

See there's the day the Lord has made and then there's this manufactured today.

It's the day of to-do lists and plans.

The divine has no to-do lists.

Its plan is singular in its focus of self-realization.

Now nothing wrong with plans.

I like to make them.

People sometimes like to make them for me.

But they're manufactured.

They're the map,

Not the territory.

And when we believe in the importance of the plans over the importance of the sacred day,

We start rushing.

We start missing out on the moment.

I have plans.

I'm a very serious person.

I have to get over here.

I must get over there quickly.

Missing out on all the sacred opportunities of the day.

When we live for plans,

We live in the eyes of other people.

Not fun.

This is where self-criticism and judgment and the superficial person we think we ought to be to please so-and-so comes in.

When we live for the day itself,

We live in the eyes of the sacred.

We unfold in the holy magnificence of who we are and who we can be,

Even on a difficult day.

If you want a reminder of the importance of the present moment,

Have children.

They teach us because they live in the present better than anyone else.

And they grow and change so fast.

Our son is turning 21 in October.

Whenever I see him,

I remember watching soap operas as a kid,

And when they would change an actor,

The voice of God would come up and say,

The role of Susan Lucci will now be played by,

Or whoever it is,

Erica Cain.

That was who she was on the show.

So much change so quickly.

So precious is time.

My daughter turns seven next month.

Not only does she live in the present moment,

But she knows when I'm not with her.

She knows when I'm not present.

It's interesting.

Think about the people that you care about,

And when they're misbehaving or calling out,

Just ask yourself,

Could it be because I'm not being present to them?

She knows,

And she'll act out,

And she'll call out,

And I feel like I'm pretending to be present just fine,

But I'm obsessed with these plans.

All these things I have to get done.

And she calls me back to now and to here.

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will not rush through it.

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will not hide from it.

If a lot of us are being honest,

We hide from the day.

We immediately define it as different than what it really is,

And we sink down into our repression,

Our inhibition,

Those so-called plans,

Our judgments,

All those places where we're holding ourselves back.

And to experience the sacrament of the day,

To truly connect to it,

We have to learn to be open.

We have to become unhidden.

We have to allow ourselves to be revealed.

It's then that this incredible spiritual quality called resonance kicks in.

Resonance is when what is taking place around you connects with what's going on in the universe inside you.

Oh,

This line in this book,

This is perfect for what I'm going through.

This is the ideal song for my day.

It takes me back to right here.

That sermon,

I don't know if it was any good,

But it was just what I needed to hear today.

When we truly open up,

The day opens up to us,

And it becomes a divine dialogue,

A sacred rapport that we have with divinity and our own soul and the best of our own life.

And even when it's challenging,

It somehow becomes sweet.

When we are willing to be transparent,

Open,

Willing to change for God's sake,

Open to changing our minds,

Life,

This day,

It can heal you.

It can open you wider than you've ever thought possible.

It can deepen and ground you in a greater and higher truth.

You just have to stay open,

Listen.

My dad passed away last year,

And his legacy is to me so much,

But many of you know a lot of it is music.

And it was so interesting walking through that painful time,

Driving overnight to California and all these things.

And I often refer to the experience as a nightmare shattered by grace.

Little shards of meaning and teaching would come in.

And I drove a lot,

And so I had a lot of music on my smartphone.

And a lot of you know that the first song alphabetically on your iPod will sometimes replay over and over.

And it was this song,

A new song by a band called Guster called All Day.

And it's clearly about a father speaking to his child.

And the line that it says over and over is,

We've got all day,

All day.

And here I am driving,

And the message clearly is,

Josh,

You do not have all day.

You're going to see your dad in physical form for the last time.

And yet there's another line in the song too.

It says,

Remember I told you,

Forever I'd hold you,

Which I don't recall my dad ever saying to me,

But maybe he did.

And here's this little message.

Now it may sound weird,

But there's something about a song.

A song may have been recorded in the past,

But it can speak to us of eternal memory.

A song properly understood is something timeless.

How grateful I am,

As strange as it may seem,

To have been open enough to the day to get a message about loss.

This thing in our lives that is so difficult to accept,

Understand,

And integrate into our own experience.

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will not rush through it.

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will not hide from it.

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will move forward in it.

Those of us who get attached to living in our story about the world and the universe,

In the story of our lives,

We wind up stuck on a page.

We wind up stuck at the end of a chapter in our lives,

And we protest this day.

You get that?

I am in protest of this day because this day is not enough for me.

That day back then,

That's what I want to get back to.

Look at all this stuff that has happened,

That has changed,

The loss in my life,

The changes.

I don't want what's tomorrow.

I need what's yesterday.

And the divine,

It's saying to us,

It's calling us.

If you would just trust,

Just turn the page a little bit,

You'd see that you can move forward and you can let what does not belong in the past go and bring forth what is most essential about it with you to integrate,

To understand,

To deepen in,

To grow.

Trust me.

Trust me.

Just turn that page and let me do the rest.

But when we cling to being the narrator of our own sad,

Hard luck,

And sometimes broken stories,

We miss the opportunity to live the story of our wholeness and of our complete becoming.

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will move forward in it.

It's not my day.

It's God's day made for me.

I co-create,

But it's there to help me live my true story.

I'm in Vail,

Colorado for a week with my daughter the whole time and my son and his girlfriend come for a couple of days and it's just me and my daughter and it's a gondola day.

You're at 8,

000 feet in Vail and you take this ski gondola another 2,

000 feet up and it's heaven there.

It's literally heaven filled with capitalists.

I did the math.

It's $13 a chicken finger when you get up.

But it's early in the morning and my daughter and I start the walk to the gondolas and like a record needle hitting in my head,

What comes on?

We've got all day,

All day.

I think about my father.

Did he ever think of me the way that I get to think of spending this day with my beautiful little girl?

When I love her,

Is it his way of loving me?

When she loves me,

Is it a reminder of my love for him?

A couple tears run down my face and I hide them from Nancy June and we have an eternal day.

It's such a beautiful day that is over in TikTok time,

But in sacred time,

Lasts forever.

And of course,

I'm 44 and she's six and so there's always weird little things that happen.

On this particular evening,

There's a toothache and we go to get some medicine for it and we're driving back to our hotel and a song comes on that gets me thinking of Nancy's mother who isn't with us on this trip this week.

A couple tears start running out of my eyes and Nancy says,

Daddy,

Don't cry.

And I go,

Nancy,

It's okay for daddy to cry once in a while.

And she says,

Yeah,

Yeah,

But just once a day.

You already cried once on the way to the gondola this morning.

And she's right.

When we experience loss,

It's good to cry.

When you experience change,

It's good to cry.

But it's also so important to care for ourselves enough to trust this day that it has everything you need to move you forward.

This day has everything you need for your healing,

For your deepening,

For your opening,

For your divine right inspiration.

Let it be open to it.

Why rush?

It has everything you need.

Today is the day the Lord has made.

I will not rush through it.

I will not hide from it.

I will move forward in it.

And today is the day the Lord has made and nobody else.

And nobody else.

Emeritus practitioners,

Question for you this morning.

After over 20 years of practitioner service,

Have you removed annoying people from your life?

Maybe a few.

But I have found in my practice that no matter how divine and focused and grounded I am in my spiritual practice,

There are those people who want to call us not into the day the Lord has made,

But the day they have made for us.

They cry out to us with criticisms,

With the importance of their problems,

With their belief that if we change something about the truth of who we are,

It would somehow make things better for them.

And what I want to say today is that these folks,

They deserve our compassion.

They deserve our listening.

In some ways,

They may be God's vehicle to give us a message,

To look deeper at our lives and make important changes.

And even though you would give them the shirt off your back,

Never give them your center.

Never give them your center.

I think this was an essential part of Jesus' teaching,

That if someone hits you on one cheek,

To turn the other,

That if someone makes you walk a mile with them,

To go two.

It was a message of forgiveness,

But it was also a message of divine resilience,

Of defiant love.

It's the recognition that no matter what you do,

You are not going to take me out of this day the Lord has made.

You're not going to take me from my center,

And I'm going to love you anyway.

That's the grand message.

No matter what is happening to you in your life,

And it could be challenging,

And there may be several people to blame,

And you may need to put boundaries in,

And et cetera,

Et cetera,

Love anyway.

Our practitioner,

Brennan Flood,

Put it so beautifully earlier in this year when they shared their poem,

Love Louder.

Remember,

Whatever that noise,

No matter how annoying it is,

Love louder.

That within you can help you overcome it,

And real anger comes for ourselves when we know that we've intentionally surrendered to someone else's story or false perception of who we are.

I love how the Buddha put it.

He said,

As a mother watches over her child,

Willing to risk her own life to protect her only child,

So with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings,

Suffusing the whole world with unobstructed loving kindness.

What does that mean for you,

To live with unobstructed loving kindness?

Today is the day the Lord has made,

And it's a wonderful thing,

Because when it's complete,

You can give it back to her.

I don't need to own this day.

This is God's day.

This is spirit's day,

Made for me.

I get to make choices,

Like in a which way book,

About where to go,

But when it's done,

I get to give it back to God.

Cardinal Daniels was a great cardinal who was known to pray in his church before leaving each night,

And he would ask God,

God,

Does this parish belong to you or to me?

And God would speak back to him and say,

I think it belongs to me.

Very well,

Cardinal Daniels would say,

And he would give the church back to God.

In our own lives,

Let us not fall into that illusion that it all has to belong to us or rest on our shoulders.

Let's give it back to the divine and let it do its thing for a better tomorrow.

And so I close this morning with an evening affirmation and a morning affirmation to help us embrace this concept that today is the day that God has made just for you and just for me.

In the evening,

We can affirm,

I release this day to the divine.

Wait,

Wait.

Okay.

I like this.

Let's all say it together.

I release this day to the divine.

I entrust tomorrow to the infinite.

The best is in constant creation.

Let's do it one more time because it might be nice if we believed it too.

I release this day to the divine.

I entrust tomorrow to the infinite.

The best is in constant creation.

Can you believe that for yourself and your life?

And a morning affirmation that goes like this,

I step fully into this day as it is and wrestle not with what this day is not.

I embrace this day as it is and release any idea that it is not what I want.

This day has all I need to become all that I am called to be.

I can rest and know and believe that this day knows for me what I don't have to know for myself right now.

That as I surrender to its embrace,

It carries me.

That every moment is there to hold me up.

That every encounter is a blessing,

Overt or hidden.

That every piece of art I experience,

Every piece of food that I consume,

Every breath,

Every right here and right now is God's sacred touch,

God's sacred message,

The divine sacred guidance leading me to my next step.

What a sacred gift.

Can we accept it?

Moving into prayer this morning,

I invite,

Their legs are probably getting tired,

Our practitioners to stand and hold this divine truth for each of us.

And I just affirm and know that the best thing I can do right now when it comes to this day is release any preconceived idea.

Any preconceived idea that diagnosis this day is not enough.

That somehow puts out the idea that this day will reflect to me those limited and critical beliefs I have about myself.

That this day will reflect to me my losses as opposed to my victories and connections.

I release any preconceived ideas of the limitedness of this day and I simply open up to God's miracle of today.

I don't have to know what it looks like.

I can already sense what it feels like.

A divine inspiration bringing me out of my shell,

Out of any protective coating I have delicately placed around my heart to open up,

To step into a greater degree of lovingness,

Of livingness,

Of joy and of laughter.

The recognition that even in pain or in sadness,

Even in melancholy,

There is so much breath,

So much love to carry me forward.

Knowing and affirming that this day is answered prayer for each one of us.

May we live that answer by allowing this day to guide us and to experience after experience moment by moment of our highest and most complete good that is indeed complete to unwrap and experience right here,

Right now.

We let it be.

We let it heal.

We let it inspire.

We let it reveal.

We let it grow.

We let it become.

And so it is.