INNER LIGHT MINISTRIES Newsletter
Putting
Volume 27 Number 3
S
by Jim Gordon, President of ILM (from Are You Living In Service Or In Separation?, 8/30/15)
ervice has always been primary in my life, and Brian and I have tried to express about service as a primary action in this path of Inner Light Ministries. The service we ask people to stay focused on is the meditation because that is the first service – it’s putting God first, and it’s allowing God to be first in your life, in your actions, in your thoughts, in your feelings. It’s putting God first. That’s what I did as a child. I put God first, and I was always able, wanting actually, to put God first before football, before baseball, before going over to someone’s house to play, before other things – I always put God first in my time with God, in my prayerful state, in my meditative state – that was more important to me than anything else. And that’s really important for you to pay attention to, because it’s that action upon which everything else is built. It’s great to be of service to people in the world. It’s great to go out and be of service, but if you don’t have a strong foundation of loving, of forgiveness, of listening, of putting God first in that action, you’re going to find that ultimately you’re going to get burned out very quickly in service. And you’re going to feel as if you’ve gotten caught in a trap that you, yourself, have put yourself into, because it was more of a desire of the mind, the ego, to go out and prove yourself or to demonstrate yourself before the world than it was to truly be of service. When I go out and do service, when I’ve always done service, I’ve always gone out to serve God in the world, but my first action was to serve God first in me; and that’s done through meditation, and taking responsibility for yourself, and to wake up, to wake up and to pay attention. “What am I doing right now? Why am I doing this? Why am I saying this right now?” – rather than just living life in reaction and getting caught up in the whirlwind, in the storms of the
God First
December 2015
world around you. Brian and I always say, when we start introducing this pathway to people, is to put God first, spend time first with God; and it’s not just spend a week or spend a year – it’s now. Start now, and put God first in all things. And you do that by, when you get up in the morning and you do your meditation – that’s putting God before the rest of the day. Then you get up and you go do, and you take care of yourself, you get ready for your day. But, in that, through the meditation you’ve put forward your focus. You’ve brought yourself to a one-pointed focus by going inside, speaking God’s Sacred Name, focusing on that River of Loving, connecting with that River of Loving within you, and you begin to live more into that Loving all the time; and when you finish your meditation, you get up and you take that action with you wherever you go. You don’t leave what you just did in the meditation in the chair. You don’t leave ‘being connected to the River of Loving’ in the chair – “Oh, I’ll come back to it tomorrow when I sit down and meditate again.” But there are some people who do that. It’s to take that which you’ve come awake to in your meditation and take that into your life. As you do that more and more, you’re going to live into the Loving: you’re going to let go of all those things that have separated you from your loving inside; you’re going to live into the truth of who you are, and you’re going to find that peace inside that you’ve been longing for; and you will fill that emptiness up that you just can’t seem to find the means by which to do it. Money, cars, people, degrees, whatever; they don’t fill up that space, but what fills it up is you waking up to the truth of who you are as soul and start living in that flow of Loving once again. So, before you go and do service, service in the world in a bigger way, first do service unto yourself. Do the meditation. Take responsibility for your thoughts and your feelings, your actions and your reactions. Let that be an opportunity for you to take what you’ve found in meditation, the Loving, into your daily life and begin to live it into your life. Do the loving, accepting, and forgiving, first, with yourself. (See Jim’s Travel Schedule For 2016 Letter on page 17)