HEALTH AND WHOLENESS

I was blessed to have a massage today that included some cranial-sacral therapy that I had never heard of before . . . God is so good and so faithful. I believe that the Lord always has a way for us to be well and whole, whether it comes through prayer, through diet, through therapies of all the kinds known to people . . . and all wholeness and health comes from Him and is in Him because His will for us is that we have health and enjoy the life each one of us has been given.

As it says in the first chapter of John's Gospel "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

When God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, He wanted to give human beings a way to know Him in a different way than He had ever revealed Himself before or since. Even though it has been over 2000 years since He was born, we are still able to know Him because He sent His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to reveal Jesus to all of us if we are willing to open our hearts to Him. And this Truth is different from a fact that you can verify or than something that you can prove through a scientific experiment that comes out the same way every time so that people come to believe it is true. The Truth that the Spirit of Truth helps us to come to know, is something we believe because we have the experience of it.

Faith is a gift that has to be received and no one has true faith without having experiences that help a person to be sure about what he or she believes. When we come to know the Lord through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, we are able to live the abundant life that Jesus promises us.

One of my favorite passages about how the Holy Spirit works is the one where it says that you will hear the Lord will tell you where to go, whether to the right or to the left (Isaiah 30:21) That goes along with the prophecy that says that God will place His law in people's hearts (Jeremiah 31:33), and the messianic prophecy that says "They will be taught by God." (Isaiah 54:13).

There's so much in the Bible that helps us to know that Jesus is God, and that helps us to be able to know the Truth. The Holy Spirit illuminates Bible passages to answer questions we have, and help us to understand.

The Bible is very important, but sometimes people make it and idol. It is a tool that God has given us, but true Word of God is Jesus, as it says in the first chapter of John's Gospel. The Holy Spirit also uses scripture to answer prayers that we pray, but the words themselves are not some kind of magic. The words of scripture is only be made powerful by God through our faith with the help of the Holy Spirit.

When we go back to the Greek language used to write the New Testament, all this is easier to understand than the way the the word "word" is used for two very different meanings in the Greek. We call the Bible the "Word of God," and it is a book written with words to tell narrate the experiences of the history of many people with the One True God given to us through the lens of people descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- and the traditions of their ancestors and well as others who came to know and believe in the One true God through the Bible.

Every culture has spiritual, and/or religious, and sometimes philosophical traditions that come from the ways that the people of the culture deal with the divine and the spiritual world throughout their history. These traditions are some of the components. that make each culture unique, but that also connect human beings of different cultures to one another.

These days there are a lot of people who try to promulgate the belief that all spiritual paths lead to the same god. But I don't believe that is true. There is only one True God and all the other gods, goddesses and spiritual entities are false gods. Being open to and worshiping false gods and idols is very dangerous because only God is good and every spiritual force that tries to draw us away from God is trying to keep us from being blessed and from receiving the abundant and eternal life that is promised to us in Christ Jesus.

In the Bible when it says that god is a jealous God, I used to think that was strange because it seemed kind of petty and selfish. However, recently I have come to understand it in a different way. I think that the Lord makes clear that He is jealous when people believe in other gods, goddesses and idols because when they do, it robs them of the relationship they can have with God Who is Love.

The Lord created each human being for His own sake, so that He could be in a loving relationship with each person and with each group of people who open their hearts to love Him and to receive His blessings. When we seek something else, we are vulnerable to the principalities and powers that St. Paul writes about in Chapter 6 of his Letter to the Ephesians.

In our world today, so dominated by all that has come down to us from the Age of Reason and the secular humanism that seems so logical and seductive, we do not acknowledge and respect the validity of who we are in spirit and how we fit into and live in the spiritual world. However, we do not truly and completely fulfill who we are as human beings when we neglect our spirituality or when we deny the existence of God Who is Love.

I have been thinking of all this lately as I have been doing some pastoral counseling with a friend who is moving through a time of grief and tragedy. And, I started out trying to describe a bit about my journey to wholeness, and ended up trying to make clear that unless we know who we are in spirit as well as physically and materially, we are not truly whole.  Of course, these are just my ruminations on the subject,with the help of the Holy Spirit. As I have prayed and tried to write what I believe the Lord is asking me to share, a lot of what I have written above has come to me. I offer it up to you trusting that if it is of any value to you, that the Holy Spirit will bless it and make it clearer than I can make it.

May the Lord continue to bless and keep you and yours, today and always.

IN THIS NEW YEAR . . .

I'm so blessed to be seeing the new year in with my sister and our dad. God is so good and so faithful! 

Champagne and shrimp scampi . . . traditional family favorites and upholding the custom from dad's childhood and beyond that it brings a blessing on the house when the first one to enter the house in the new year is a man -- so we all went out after toasts and a short round of "Auld Lang Syne," and then Dad was the first to go back into the house.

Brought back memories of seeing the new year in at Dad's family home where he was born 88 1/2 years ago . . . built by his father I the south side of Chicago off Stoney Island, not far from where the Skyway to Gary, IN,  begins . . . built when we were kids in the late 60s. And I can still remember the thrill of traveling on it high above the city for the first time just because Dad wanted to give us that thrill . . . And I remember it well, and especially the new vista being at that height afforded and the new perspective gained . . . just like seeing the city and surrounding area from new heights on the first trip to the top of the Prudetial Building, the tallest edifice in Chicago in the early 60; and later the marvel of looking out and down from the top floor of the next tallest skyscraper built in the city--the John Hancock Building; and still later going up in a "jet-propelled" elevator to the top of the building formerly known as The Sears Tower around the time I headed out to college downstate. 

These experiences were all treats because our parents loved architecture and art; music, the theater . . . and delighted in sharing what they loved with us . . .Sunday afternoon excursions . . . not just to visit our grandparents or to pay our respects at the graves of our grandfather and other family members, but even when we also went to those places, side trips along the way to see beautiful and interesting structures . . . the Marina Towers downtown on one curve of the Chicago River, the Baha'i Temple along the shore of Lake Michigan in Winnetka, seen while diving north up Lakeshore Drive and beyond; or when we drove northwest from the city to view houses and Unity Temple designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and splendidly on display in Oak Park.

Memories triggered by familiar rituals and holiday celebrations seem to connect to one another lik a string of pearls as I have mentioned before in the past. Besides New Years Eves in the house where Dad grew up, there were also memorable Christmases and New Years Eve celebrations when aunts, uncles, cousins and friends came to be with us in Tower Lakes. 

Images that stand out in my mind include moon glow on the shimmering snow covered lake when we took the jubilation outside with horns and noise-makers, shouts and whoops . . . again making sure a man or a boy was the first one back into the house for good luck in the new year. And the grownups playing Bridge . . . far into the night after we had all been sent to bed, falling asleep while hearing the muted sounds of their laughter and table talk downstairs.

Then we woke up to the new day, the first of the new year, and maybe it was a bright cold day with the sunlight casting sparkles on the snow that blanketed lawns and frozen surface of the lake; shining on huge, broad, tall evergreen trees laden with big clumps of snow perched on every outer branch.

But lately most of my New Years Eves have not been spent where there is snow and ice as they were in my childhood . . . except that last year I was in Colorado with my son and his family, and I have twice been in Russia to welcome in a new year. The first time was when when I was in Obninsk in the Kaluga region a few hundred miles southwest of Moscow when 1994 arrived, and the last time was when I spent most of the winter of 2010-2011 with a dear friend I grew up with who at the time was serving as the Cultural Affairs Attaché in the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok  

I have written things about both of those sojourns for the "string of pearls" offerings in the past, so maybe it's not necessary to elaborate much now. Maybe I will later.

I suppose I should come up with some New Years Resolutions, but I can't think of any right now. Can you? If you have any you need help and encouragement to keep them, please let me know. A friend who knows how often I embark on various renditions of the "Kathy Harris Self-Improvement Program" recently gently took me to task for not giving it all over to the Holy Spirit instead of continuing to try to get it right on my own . . . again. 

Live and learn . . . !

I've come to realize that unless I am yielded to the Holy Spirit, the changes I try to make don't last. And what do I really know needs to be changed and what doesn't? The Lord has the best perspective on all of that. We are not His puppets, and I don't mean to suggest that unless we allow Him to give us a total makeover that we can't have a life the way we want it to be.

But it takes time and the way that the Lord loves us is so wonderful.  Everything that He has for us is tailored to each one of us individually, because who each of us is as a unique person is very special and amazing -- created by God to be loved and blessed; created for His own sake so that we could live in loving relationship with Him while we are on Earth and for all eternity. 

So my prayer for you in this new year, Beloved, as always, is that you will recognize who you are as a beautiful, wonderful individual created by the Fullness of Love not only to live in relationship with Love, but also that you will abide in Love, Grace, Peace and Joy now and always.