INNER LIGHT MInistries Journal August, 2011
Open To Receive
Volume 23 Number 2
Loving
T
by Jim Gordon, President of ILM (from Everything Begins With Loving God, 6/27/10)
here’s a simple statement that has supported me through my journey of life and my inner journey with God, which is: As you give so shall you receive.
As a child, I often focused on the process of giving into the world without really paying attention to the deeper meaning of that statement. That was until I began to truly do my prayer, which later became meditation, and then I realized that the true action of giving and receiving begins, not in the world, not with others, not outside ourselves, but inside; the action of giving and receiving is really with God. First, we begin with giving and receiving with God. And that can be a big journey unto itself because many of us are good givers but aren’t great receivers. We don’t feel worthy and, for whatever reason, we block off that action of receiving. Yet, what is it that we want more than anything else? We want to receive. We want love. We want gifts, praise, thanks or whatever it is, we want to receive, but at the same time, we shut down, we push the praise or thanks away because we don’t know how to receive. The easiest way to learn this process of giving and receiving is to spend time every day giving to God. And what do we have to give God? God doesn’t want anything of the physical nature. He wants of our spirit, and our spirit is Loving. So what God wants from us in this process of giving and receiving is Loving; to give love, to share love, to be in Loving with Him. And then, He wants us to open to receive Loving. This may take time to develop inside of us, or it may happen right away – it’s just different for everyone depending on where we are on our journey. Just know that as we begin this process of giving and receiving, ultimately we are going to truly experience it. At first, we may say that we don’t know what Loving is, that we don’t feel it, so how can we share it? Just do it. Sometimes we just have to do it … and do it … until
we begin to understand and can move with the process. Maybe it’s a verbal statement, or an imaginational statement of just visualizing – seeing, feeling, knowing that we are, in some form or another, sharing our Loving with God and opening to receive God’s Loving. Eventually, it will come into alignment inside of us. I used to work in the junior high office and one of my jobs was to mimeograph tests for teachers. I’m not mechanical in nature and so I struggled within myself for several days feeling inadequate. I was given a manual to read but didn’t understand it. I’d stand in front of the machine and say, “Now, what do I do?” Finally, I realized that I just had to do it because I wasn’t going to learn it any other way. By the mistakes I made I learned what not to do and I also learned what to do until I suddenly went from trying to figure it out to the action of being in the process of copying things. And that’s what this meditation is about. We begin by doing. By trial and error, we find out how to give and how to open ourselves to receive. Keep in mind that the automatic response in giving is to receive. Once we learn this and are doing the process of loving God and God loving us, the true meaning of giving and receiving, then we can take this action into the world. Sometimes, I will give gratitude to somebody and they will immediately say, “Oh, you don’t need to say thanks.” We may find we do that very thing with God and, in doing so, stop the flow. If we find ourselves going into resistance, we simply need to hold a focus in that moment and say, “I’m just going to see what it feels like to receive.” Just as we have opened ourselves to giving, we can also open ourselves to receiving, and then we truly are living the fullness of Loving; we truly are moving into that flow of a dynamic living force living life in a fuller way. And remember, whether it is from God, a friend, a family member, or whomever, the full experience of giving is also that of receiving.