Growing up as a Southern Baptist churchgoer in the ’80s and ’90s, prayer was a part of daily life. We prayed before meals and before bed, reciting simple poetic lines that reminded us to be thankful and to wish blessings for our family. It wasn’t described in terms of meditation or manifesting. I wasn’t told to pray in any particular way, just to trust that God would do what was best no matter what I asked of him. But I also remember my mother guiding me to ask Jesus to come live in my heart. I pondered this with secret confusion, unsure of what it meant to have a “personal relationship” with this mysterious figure who was somehow God in the flesh.
I thought I understood the concept of worship. You love the god, you sing praises to the god, you study the god’s book, and you ask the god for assistance. But this god was always somewhere far away. I remember my mother telling me she disagreed with the song lyric: “God is watching us from a distance.” But I didn’t feel he was close, either. One day I asked God to move a specific item in my bedroom to prove he was real. No answer, of course, but I knew he wouldn’t respond to trivial tests. I knew I was meant to believe without proof.
I was probably a pre-teen when the “What Would Jesus Do” bracelet appeared on every young Christian’s wrist. Something about those bracelets always felt off to me. I thought it was too cute – more cult status symbol than applicable philosophy. But this wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that Jesus didn’t have life experiences I could relate to. I could make vague sense of him as a role model. What would Jesus do? He would be kind to everyone; he would put the needs of others before his own. Easier said than done, I thought, especially when so few of Jesus’s signature moves could be replicated in the average person’s daily life. We can’t perform miracles, so how could we emulate Jesus?
I now realize I don’t want to ask what Jesus would do, I want to ask “What would Jesus encourage me to do?” (WWJEMTD … ?) I cannot assume his right actions for my life when first what I need is to hear him speak directly to me. I need to open a conversation. That’s how I want to approach a new walk with Christ – talking and listening. Praying and meditating. Somewhere along the heirarchy of cosmic consciousness, Jesus and my higher self are merged. My spiritual journey has taught me to listen to my higher self, and I finally listened long enough to understand that I’m not alone up there. Listening to my higher self and listening to Jesus are different. My higher self is the version of me that Jesus sees in Heaven, the version that has always been waiting for me to surrender to God’s will. Surrender – the sure ender, the end of certainty and the beginning of faith. In listening deeply, quietly, I discern what thoughts are mine and what messages the pure consciousness of love, embodied by Jesus, guides me toward.
The Jesus I invited into my heart is not so much a man as an essence. He is a consciousness, a wavelength, an alive frequency. He is the original distortion of God – the first pulse of unconditional love the Creator assigned to emanate from every photon of the cosmos, the perfect holographic baseline that makes creation possible. In this sense, as beings made of light densities, we are all physical incarnations of God, and the man we call Jesus was sent to Earth to reveal the next phase of humanness through his story. Our ascension into that phase of higher consciousness, in which we will have more compassion and more connection, is guided by him. The spiritual work is to embody unconditional love within ourselves.
President Trump released a statement this Easter that was highly offensive. He unleashed war and profanity on a holy day. This allowed everyone to gut-check themselves against the presence of holiness by holding two extremes in one moment. We were given the opportunity to ask ourselves what we value, what is holy and sacred, and to see how the world of man infiltrates our perspective. Was your Easter ruined? Mine wasn’t. In fact, I felt more inspired by Easter this year than in many years past. I attended church with my wife and parents. I listened closely to the reminder that Jesus’s resurrection is the clincher of the Christian belief system. “He died for our sins” might be another whole essay, but when Jesus defeated death before the eyes of his followers, he showed us all the proof that our existence doesn’t end on Earth. His “ascension into Heaven” is what makes it possible for us to invite him to live in our hearts, to understand that he is alive in a mystical sense that offers everlasting life to each one of us. His consciousness left the human form and merged with the cosmos in a virtual throne that oversees the collective soul history and consciousness of all of us. Each one of us has a story written in the stars, and Jesus knows them all by heart.
The order of the cosmos is not random. Each of us is formed of stellar material – the light of God. Each cosmic body that moves our story with a magnetic pull along the path of our destiny was present at the formation of our personality, and was present at the entry time of our souls into the womb. These sacred geometric light formations bestow living energy into our bodies, etched like a stored program onto our DNA – a crystalline memory source that we can decode. Every human is unique, but we share certain modes of experience. We all have a mind, a heart, a throat – each of these have both a physical and an energetic component. We have a brain (mind). We have a throat (voice). We have a heart (love). The pathway of energy from stars to human body is in one way expressed through human design. It is the study of self and the study of soul. It is guidance for loving relationships.
Jesus is God’s gift to us. He awakens us to the knowledge of what is possible. We can use our free will to follow his teachings. These were never about dogma. These were about relationships – how we treat each other; how to love one another. When he speaks in the first person, he speaks of behalf of the human collective. “I am the way” means that way is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Unity with all is the way, not separation and judgment of others. But so many of us cannot treat others the way we would like to be treated because we struggle to love ourselves and to acknowledge that we are inherently loved because we exist, that we are made of love and are saved from evil by love.
When you sit with yourself, you sit with the light of God. He’s always there, holding the candle flame of your soul’s living fire. When people talk to me about the problems in their lives, I hear God asking them to be still, to sit with him, to reach for the peace that’s available in every moment, to pray and to meditate – to speak and to listen in conversation with him. We are all connected by God’s living love, the unifying force of cosmic oneness illuminated in Christ. We are all aspects of the Creator, and therefore we are all worthy of love. The cosmic bliss we call the Kingdom of Heaven is right here waiting within us – a burning ember waiting for our spark to light the fire. In a world of infinite perspectives, Jesus is the one who will always guide us back home to the truest love of all.
Thank you, Jesus, for living in my heart. Thank you for your patience with me. Thank you for showing me your presence in all things. Thank you for holding the light of God as a beacon for the weary human. Thank you for never leaving us, and showing me that your return is truly the revelation of love in every heart.
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