I experienced my first Zoom Virtual Women’s Day Retreat titled “If I’m Honest”. This was a great sentence starter for everything I learned during the day.
“If I’m honest”, I don’t have it all figured out.
“If I’m honest,” I don’t have my eating habits under control.
“If I’m honest”, I don’t have my living situation figured out.
“If I’m honest”, I don’t have my new life in retirement figured out.
The day focused on being present, honest and listening. Take a moment and fill in the blank for yourself, “If I’m honest I _________________.”
Honesty with yourself is the first step to being ‘wholehearted’, which means bringing your whole self to everything you do. If I’m going to be wholehearted I need to ‘recover my heart’. It takes a willingness to let God do it for me, accepting that I am powerless and can’t do it alone. Trusting that who He says I am is all I need to be. A starting place is looking at areas of my life, i.e., anger, control issues, bitterness. These are deep under currents of what is really going on. When I’m honest and begin to deal with these areas, I can ‘recover my heart’ and be ‘wholehearted’. Wholeheartedness will take a lot of work and being kind to myself and others but it feels worth it.
Richard Rohr in his Daily Meditations wrote, “The greatest commandment is to love God and the best way I know to love God is to love what God loves—which is everything! Surely this is the way that Jesus loves. To love as Jesus loves, we too must be connected to the Source of love.”
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them [a scholar of the law] tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” —Matthew 22:34-40
The only way I know to stay connected to the source of love is to have a daily time with the Lord in worship and song. This keeps me focused and listening to Him. Then I see Jesus in everyone around me.
How is your heart today?