Until recently, I have been trying to live every day consistent with my experiences of contact with God and developing a relationship with God. “Trying to live????” Until I die, living is my default state. What I am realizing is that living is what I do and doing is choosing…even not doing is choosing and living. As long as I live mainly isolated in my skull, revealing only what serves to enhance and protect my safety, my perspective becomes so skewed that actions become ill founded and I become entangled in a net of internal and external deceits, misqualified actions, and a proliferation of negative consequences. So I turn my will and my life over to the care of God, because I judge myself incompetent. I resent myself and God, then, to at least some extent and sometimes a lot…rebellion. So living in isolation makes living God-centered harder because selfishness and self-centered thinking tend to become the moment by moment norm. Someone once said to me that once I truly accept Jesus/Father/Spirit as my savior from my lifelong bondage of Self, That Spirit goes to work to re-form me into a new man, born once again. But while I have no plan to fix me I have a powerful urge to fix me, and it seems Spirit simply waits calmly until I get out of the Way. Determining to go out and do good doesn’t work either, because again my faulty perceptions and judgments are in the way. When I ask for help to do His will as I go out, and am alert to and appreciative of the glorious beauty all around me as I am out and about, I return home refreshed and well– did I do good work? I have no idea. It is a lonely old man’s vice to talk more than he listens. Sometime when I go out as I just said, I return aware of intriguing and sometimes surprisingly wise things ordinary folks have said, and I realize I must have done some listening. Since my medical spinal procedure of Nov. 6th, I am not living in overwhelming pain, or indeed any pain, but more importantly I am discovering just living. When I finally recline for sleep, sometimes I feel bad about some things, sometimes I feel good about some things, but I never feel completely good or bad. I glimpse ways I am BEING changed, and I am flooded with gratitude. Occasionally a teary Joy overwhelms me. Sometimes I am deeply saddened by the memory of having caused hurt to another, and can finally forgive my younger self…     Just living. It is enough. It is sufficient. It is full. It is the wind of Spirit forming my life…

—– Dedicated to Sharon and her husband in thanks for their example.