Where should we begin?

Yesterday I sat down to do my bible reading.  I prayed before I started,

"Dear Lord, help me to see you today in what I read.  In a passage, or a verse, or a single word.  You are mighty God and nothing is impossible for You.  May Your words and Your truth seep into the plans I make and every thought I think today.  Amen."

So then I turned to my reading for the day.  I was supposed to read a number of chapters of the book of Ruth, but I only got 7 verses in and I had to stop because it was like God had thrown a huge billboard in front of my face, to get my attention!

Ruth 1:6 One day she got herself together, she and her two daughters-in-law, to leave the country of Moab and set out for home; she had heard that God had been pleased to visit his people and give them food.7 And so she started out from the place she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law with her, on the road back to the land of Judah.

Do you see that in verse 7!
AND SO SHE STARTED OUT FROM THE PLACE SHE HAD BEEN LIVING!
She started out from WHERE she was, NOT from somewhere else!  It's the only place you CAN start.  You can't begin a journey and immediately expect to be in a different place or at a different level, it just won't happen.

How often do I do that?  Expect things to change immediately, or to somehow be different than they are, and when they prove not to be, get disappointed?  Particularly with myself.  I set intentions, but I have a false estimation of my current position.  It's not the measurable things I do it with.  I can jump on a set of scales, or use a tape measure.  I can tick off a To Do list that I have read my bible that day, I can log exercise, I can stay in touch with people and so on.  The problem comes with the things that are more difficult to measure.

So I deceive myself about the state of my relationship with God, or about the state of my relationships with others.  I make false estimations of my mood, of my heart, of how "together" I am.  I choose to believe less than the truth about my willingness to change.  I do all that, and in doing so I try to begin a journey from a place I am not.

Oh sure, I acknowledge that there are problems, I make plans to put them right, but until I can be honest with myself I cannot begin that journey in the right place.  Often the estimation I make is a more hopeful one, one that gives me less ground to cover to reach that goal, one that doesn't accept how bad things are.  However, not all my false estimates are a refusal to acknowledge how bad things are, a lot of them are a reluctance to admit how good things are.  A particular friend is often telling me how amazing I am, and I often fob her off or divert the conversation.  Why?  Does it boil down to this piece written by Marianne Williamson?

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest dear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson

BUT, whichever side of the truth I begin from, or you begin from it's going to cause a problem.  The successful way to BEGIN is to do it from a true understanding of where we are now.  What if we don't know where we are now?  Well, sometimes we tell ourselves we don't know, when we really do, I know I do that, hiding from the truth we don't want to acknowledge.  So we need to be honest with ourselves, ask God to help us with that, to keep us safe as we open up things that maybe we have been afraid to open to open up.  Trusted Godly friends can help here too.

But if we still find ourselves not knowing where we are at with a particular situation, then we definitely need to go to God.  Come before the one who knows us better than we know ourselves and yet still loves us and ask Him to show us the truth about where we are and where or how we need to begin.