A message from 8 years ago, which addresses 4 conversations from yesterday

"Everything in life that we deeply and truly accept undergoes change."

-- Katherine Mansfield

Accept both your humanness and your divinity, totally and without reserve, and you are free."

-- Unknown

"We cannot change anything until we accept it as it is. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."

-- Carl Gustav Jung

"One who's already accepted being soaking wet doesn't really care about or dread the rain, and he knows it won't last."

-- Turkish Proverb

"One must not attempt to hide them, justify them, or explain them away, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly, and that which we can accept we can go beyond."

-- Albert Einstein

"Acceptance is not about agreeing with, or condoning, or submitting to; it is simple acknowledgement of the facts of any given situation, and then choosing what you're going to do about it."

-- Kathleen Casey Theisen

"This applies to our condemnation of certain aspects of our inner selves that we'd rather not admit to or reveal, as well as external circumstances like rain or other people. How many times have you heard someone condemn or curse something about themselves, pledging to change it out of a desperate need to be different, only to find that the negative energy applied to condemning oneself offset and neutralized all of the positive flow of energy that change could have released. You may have heard the expressions, "What you resist, persists," and "What you chase eludes you; when you accept, it comes." Resistance is the opposite of acceptance and freezes things into a rigid position or a static state. Resistance even attracts, if not requires, the force which it resists, by definition, in order to stay alive and to suck the life out of you. Resistance and what is being resisted are entangled in a dance of oppression, struggle, possibly even violence. Remove the resistance completely, and the opposing force ceases to exist in its previous form and can be redirected in new ways."

-- Yours Truly


The above message was sent out in June of 2002. That's a long time and many messages ago. But is it ever relevant today, in light of several conversations I had yesterday. And I'd like to make an important Jesus reference related to the above, as well. When Jesus said, "Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me." (Mark 8:34), he didn't say that there wasn't really a human self that was to be denied, after having been identified, revealed, and sacrificed. The first step in denying the self is to distinguish the self that is to be denied. This acceptance of our human self liberates the divine self he is willing to be on our behalf. A little paradoxical, I know, but oh what an important paradox it is! How can we lay our humanity down and invite his indwelling spirit if we can't first identify ourselves clearly, including the very human blocks to him that we are so desperately clinging to, and we can't or won't identify those blocks if we don't first accept them as such. And then it is all possible, the full load of his incredible and invaluable invitation.

"Jesus Christ, I learned, was not suggesting that he be my impossible example (based on what I knew, but didn't accept, about myself), he was willing and able to be my total substitute. I wasn't supposed to imitate his suffering (in denial of my own), but to take full advantage of it (in replacement of my own). In his death on the cross -- which I discovered he did willingly -- my sin and my failures were identified and judged. On the cross God demonstrated His great love for me. It was there He showed me how well He really did know me. It was there He fully accepted me and invited me to accept myself (first my humanity, then my divinity). As the Bible explains in Romans 8:3, 'God made him [Jesus] who had no sin to literally be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.'"

-- Robert C.

By the way, you do remember how the clarity of Romans 8 is preceded by Paul's confusion and chaos in Romans 7, right?

"For after all, the best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain, gladly awaiting the Sun behind the clouds."

-- William Wadsworth Longfellow

From blind, unconscious suffering to choice, which might include some suffering, but with choice

"I have moved from the agony of questions I cannot answer to the agony of answers I cannot escape."

-- journal entry in the diary of Horace Bushnell

For example:

previous question I couldn't answer: Where are you, God?

current answer I cannot escape: Oh, there You are, and You want me to do what!!!

previous question I couldn't answer: How much more suffering can I take?

current answer I cannot escape: I choose my own experience of everything, including my suffering.

previous question I couldn't answer: How could you do that to me or treat me that way?

current answer I cannot escape: I create the "you" that I experience.

previous question I couldn't answer: Why can't they see how valuable I am?

current answer I cannot escape: I see how much I value the me God made in my perception of others' response to me.

question I was asking myself just yesterday: God, what are you trying to tell me with this crazy, more than trying day.

current answer I cannot escape: Get over yourself, Jim, now you know how 95% of the world's population feels every day.



This 1991 book by Pema Chodron is about saying yes to life, about making friends with ourselves and our world, about accepting the delightful and often painful situation of "no exit allowed." It exhorts us to "wake up" wholeheartedly to everything and to use the abundant, richly textured fabric of sometimes difficult everyday life as our primary spiritual teacher and guide.

Paradox of fixation on figuring out and/or fixing

"Life is about learning to love perfectly (an impossible, yet most worthy undertaking that requires a total surrender of one's will), not about being perfectly loved (an impossible, totally unworthy desire that is impossible to fulfill through one's will), the emphasis on which produces nothing but anxiety, discontent, and very shabby, if not scary, loving."

-- Yours Truly

"Nothing in life or in relationships (as opposed to stuff and the world is 'fixable' from within an attitude of 'needing it fixed;' it naturally becomes the next perfectly wonderful thing from an attitude of appreciating, celebrating, and embracing it exactly as it is."

-- Yours Truly

"A peaceful man never frets or worries about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star."

-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin

"When you find total acceptance and peace for and within yourself, you become the kind of person who can accept and live at peace with anyone."

-- Peace Pilgrim

"We cannot change anything until we fully accept it. Condemnation never fixes or liberates, it only oppresses."

-- C.G. Jung


"What you chase eludes you; ...



when you accept, it comes." (Zen saying)




Sure, fix your aquarium, your bike, your cabinet, your garage door, your laptop, your kid's tree house, your watch, whatever else you own that needs to function a certain way to be of any value, but by all means don't waste your energy trying to "fix" your circumstances - i.e.; the situations you find yourself in - whether they be with your children, your co-workers, your finances, your friends, your parents, your prospects in life and love, definitely not your spouse. Your hardest work there is to totally accept things as they are. And don't mistake acceptance for approval. It doesn't mean condoning or liking; it means "allowing to be what it is," so that it can become what it is becoming. It means trusting that the things beyond you are beyond you for a reason, that they belong to Him, and that more is happening than you could possibly know and/or understand. It means if you really want a closer look, if you'd really like to understand, then stop trying to make something happen that suits you, or trying to avoid or hide from something that doesn't, so that you can see what is happening that totally suits Him. It will bring you peace, even if with a little puzzlement, or befuzzlement.

Accepting of what is, and avoiding neediness

"To repel one's cross, thinking we can do it (or not) our own way, is to make the inevitable load even heavier."


-- Henri Frederic Amiel


"Fix your eyes on His perfection only, and you make everything else (starting with yourself) speed directly toward it."


-- William Ellery Channing


"Anything in life that we don't accept will simply stick around and make trouble for us until we eventually and finally make peace with it."


-- Shakti Gawain


"To the extent that we want, need, or demand something different from someone else (other than what we're getting), to that exact degree we will be in pain."


-- Joan Walsh Anglund


"A person only begins to become the person he wants to be when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates (and educates) his life."


-- James Allen


"Only under great pressure over extended periods of time are diamonds ever created; only by much searching and mining are diamonds ever obtained and usable, and man can find every truth connected with his being if he is willing to dig deep enough into the mine of his soul. The way to perfection is in accepting intense pressure over prolonged periods, having the courage to dig carefully and deep for the results, then putting what is found to good use for a worthwhile purpose."


-- James Allen


"The very thing we would naturally seek to avoid is what God has chosen to use to make us more like Him! Our job is simply to accept His design and His plan for our growth and maturation, needing nothing to be different. Have you ever wondered why God doesn’t just make your relationships better overnight? We often think that if God really cared for us, He would make our relationships so much easier on us. In reality, a difficult relationship is a mark of His love and care. We would prefer that God would just change the relationship or let us leave it in peace, but he won’t be content until the relationship changes us. This is how God created relationships and intended them to function. What happens in the messiness of relationships is that our hearts are revealed, our weaknesses are exposed, and we start coming to the very end of ourselves. Only when this happens do we reach out for the help that God alone can provide. While we would like to avoid the messes and enjoy deep and intimate community and partnership instantly, God says that it is in the very process of working through the messes (that often we ourselves helped create) that this intimacy is ultimately found and most deeply appreciated."


-- Timothy S. Lane & Paul David Tripp, in Relationships: A Mess Worth Making

People are constantly asking me to help them solve this perplexing relational puzzle or that, mostly asking me to help them change, figure out, fix, leave, manage, manipulate, or at least learn how to better "put up with" some difficult person(s) or relational situation(s) in their lives, as if it were really about the other person(s) or the situation(s). I can talk until I'm blue in the face on the following point (and it ceases to matter what I say after just a very little while), that this challenge and hardship is happening "for" them and not "to" them, but until a person gets there, really and truly, and begins to accept the very personal assignment from God (and we often like to fight it for a very long time) nothing ever changes much for them. And yet He does what He does, even in our prolonged "stuckness." So, I am slowly learning myself (and I have many assignments from Him that I have accepted in this arena) to talk less and love more, teach less and understand more, hurry less and hold more, struggle less and wait on Him more, and the whole set of scenarios shift for me from frustration and futility in my weakness to pure pleasure and privilege in His strength.

Through "acceptance of what is," I have come to discover, celebrate, and richly appreciate that He:


1) created under intense pressure,
2) helped me courageously mine for, find, and dig up,
3) then is so painstakingly cutting and polishing to match His perfection,
4) while teaching me how to effectively use
this priceless "diamond" inside me, for His worthwhile pupose.