INNER LIGHT MInistries Journal
Staying Awake
Volume 24 Number 1
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by Jim Gordon, President of ILM
(from Allowing God To Fill You Up, 11/1/05) ruth is everywhere. Loving is everywhere. The spiritual light is everywhere. We can find the light in everything, in everyone, in every place, and in every tradition. We can learn from philosophies, from people, and from the events we experience in this world, but the key for each of us is to follow after our own truth. By honoring it all, by bowing down in Loving to everything, we gain the wisdom, the light, and the joy of whatever we are experiencing in the moment. The Loving will lift us to another level of awareness, of understanding, and of awakening, and we’ll know the Loving is right here, right now, wherever we are. It truly is about accepting wherever we are in our own life, and wherever that is, it’s just perfect.
When I was 26 years old, the doctor told me I had cancer. I knew I had the option to break down, go into a panic, and question, “Why me?” I had some teachers in my physical life that had taught me how to live in sorrow, how to feel sorry for myself and be the victim, so I knew how to do that very well. And yet, in that moment, I knew I didn’t want to do that. As the doctor was sharing with me this news, I began focusing on the Loving. I focused on loving the moment, loving the doctor’s words, loving the doctor, loving the cancer, loving the karma, the judgment, the fear, loving my parents that the loving would help them through this process, and I was loving myself just as I was, cancer and all. That day was really a transformational point in my life because I realized what it was to love everything, everyone, and every situation. To some extent, I’d always done that in my life but never like I was doing in that moment. I awoke to a new level of Loving, of really living in the truth of myself, which is Loving. Instead of looking out into the world for guidance, protection, and understanding, I was looking up only to
April, 2012
my own soul. By choosing my inner light, I experienced how profound and available Loving truly is. Many years later, I had another dynamic experience with the power of Loving. I was driving to my brother’s home when I got a call from his neighbor telling me that my brother had died unexpectedly during the night. Immediately, I felt sorrow, and all the time I was feeling sorry, feeling remorse, and crying, I kept seeing this light shining in me, shining on me. I ignored it. I went into the darkness and into feeling the loss, but this light kept coming in even more. I knew that it was coming from my own soul. I looked up to the light, and said, “Stop it! I just want to be sad right now.” The light started to dim, and I quickly said, “I didn’t mean that.” And the light got brighter again. God said, “Have no other gods before me.” I’d been putting my brother, his death, how I was “supposed” to react and respond to this situation according to the way the world had taught me, before my own truth, before my Loving, before my soul’s light – and I was in pain. When I began to choose into the Loving, into the light, everything became peaceful and quiet, and I actually felt a sense of joy bubbling up from within me. At one point though, I thought, “I can’t be joyful. My brother just died.” As soon as I acknowledged what I was thinking, I heard that still small voice from within, that voice of God, coming through my soul, say, “Why can’t you rejoice for someone coming Home? Why can’t you rejoice for someone who has completed the journey and no longer needs to be in the world? Why can’t you rejoice, for I rejoice that he has left his body and is coming Home. Rejoice. Sing a song. Be happy for him, for he’s happy. Why not you?” And from that moment on, I was fine with my brother’s death. I chose into the joy, into the Loving, and rejoiced for his soul’s return. Our soul’s light, the inner light, is the truth, is the Loving, is God ever present with us all the time. Instead of pushing it away, or being caught up in the world, or in our process, and losing sight of the Loving, we just need to look up, and stay awake to our own inner light.