Pulling Up to the Edge of Heaven

Every moment we are sign and symbol of the resurrection we believe in and live every day. We are pilgrim people who practice resurrection power with our bodies all the time.  We watch the sun rise up every morning.  We rise out of bed.  We rise up from our pews. We rise up from our knees, bent in prayer. We rise up from tables to shake the hand of a new friend.  We rise up out of our driver seats,  from our kitchen tables, from playing a board game on the floor, from behind our desks,  our exercise mats, our gardens, and our lawn chairs.  We rise up from theatre seats, stadium seating, and even limousines. The surfer rises up on the incoming wave and performers rise upon a stage. We rise up from our bathtubs, our pools, and our recliners.  We are a people who are engaged in the process of pulling ourselves up from something beneath us to something higher.  We embody the resurrection practice so effortlessly, we have forgotten that the act of resurrection is a daily occurrence, not just something strictly reserved for the Easter season.  Our rising takes place in the most ordinary, uneventful and certainly non-celebratory ways.  We only celebrate them after we have lost the ability to do it automatically.  Ask an amputee who has lost a leg what it is like to rise up under his own strength, and begin to walk solely through his own efforts, standing high and strong on new abilities and greater possibilities.  

 

When our babies pull themselves up to a table or to the edge of a couch for the first time, it is a big deal! Moms and dads cheer them on and encourage them to do it again and again.  This step of “rising up” for a baby is the beginning of two-legged mobility, independence, and exploration of the world around them taken to a new level.  Sometimes a baby has to try and try again, falling down several times until they hold their risen stature and feel confident and secure in this new position…smiling, laughing, and so happy that they have joined the rest of the risen world.  This baby now feels bigger, braver, and has a brand new sense of belonging with the world that has always been above him.

We are just like the resurrected infant who figures out how to pull herself up, stand strong in that newly risen posture, and take on the world from a higher vantage point!  This was our first experience of resurrection!  We are invited  to join the rest of the risen world.  This Easter season we are called to be bigger, braver, and feel that we truly belong with the Risen Lord.  How do we connect with this kind of bigness?  How do we feel this level of bravery?  What is it that is going to help me “get” that I  belong in the risen family?  Will I go home from the church service I attend and believing that my life can change for the better?  Or will I fall down from my newly risen stance, shrink back, and watch someone else rise up, wishing I could too.

The risen world is inside me, the invisible place that awaits my attention every day.  It is the place where I am invited to listen to what resurrection sounds like.  It is the place that I am invited to enter and feel love rising to the surface of this world, experiencing a newly risen peace, and connecting to a higher vision of how I could be in the world.  There are three points of resurrection within each of us that will allow us to say, Yes, I am truly becoming someone different because I am a part of what Jesus did.No one can come to me unless drawn by God who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day.  John 6: 44  I left my tomb and allowed the sun to touch me.  I rose up, pulled myself up to the edge of heaven and saw the world from a newly risen point of view. Ready to explore….smiling, laughing, and happy in my new self.

Those three points of resurrection are  Center,  Mind, and  Heart.  It is no coincidence that there are three entrances that we must go through in order to rise up out from our crosses, our ash heaps, and our graves.  Our Center is our invisible world that simply put, holds the “face  and voice of God”. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God. Romans 12: 2   It is the place where we will die a thousand deaths and where love will rise a thousand times.  The gateway to the face and voice of God is silence.  The practice of silent prayer holds the promise and the “how to” of a changed life.  It is the practice of finding our bigger, grander, magnificent selves. It is the place where we will receive grace to change whatever it is we want to change in our lives. It is the place in me that holds everything that my outer world does not. It is the place we go in order to receive what we cannot give ourselves.I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be there God, and they shall be my people. Hebrews 8: 10 This place inside of us is the opposite of fear, war, prejudice, time, death, judgment, and lack.  It is the place of pure grace, strength, and expressed joy.  It is the place in me where I feel most loved, most “me”. It is the place where I feel that I am the only one God could ever love. There, I feel that loved…that cherished. Want to rise up out of your overweight body into a body less heavy and less burdensome?  Practice the Prayer of Silence first.  Want to rise up out of the job you hate and into a job you will love?  Practice the Prayer of Silence first.  Want to rise up out of your debt?  Want to move the pile of bills into a mountain of prosperity and wealth of every kind? Practice  the Prayer of Silence first.  Want to rise up out of your sugar addiction, your caffeine addiction, your drug addiction, your alcohol addiction, or your shopping addiction?  Practice the Prayer of Silence first.  Want to rise up from your abusive situation, your inability to say no, or the excuses you use not to love yourself?  Practice the prayer of Silence first.  Whatever situation you want to rise up out of, you must go within first, and downward into your deepness, in order to experience your bigger self, your braver self, and your higher way of being in the world.  What you let rise up within will soon rise up in your outer world.

Next, you must knock on the door of  your mind, and be willing to receive what is there. Only when you become a student of the successfully risen mind, the Christ-mind, will you begin to rise up out of your grave thinking.  You must re-learn, re-think, and re-train your mind if you are going to pull up to the edge of heaven, stand up on firm heavenly ground and remain there forever.  Are your thoughts leading you to the grave or leading you into the sunshine of illuminated thinking? Each ray purposefully penetrating a darkened thought, belief, or message.

Some of what you have learned about God isn’t right and is holding you captive to your grave site.  Some of what you have learned about how life works isn’t right, and is keeping you singing the same death-song.  Some of what you have been taught to believe about yourself is wrong, not you at all, and full of beliefs that just don't reflect you.  These stories we have bought into, believed in, and written by our own hand, and through our own thinking, must be re-written so that we can walk the higher path based on new facts, fresh insights, and relevant information, rooted in love.  Only when our mind is healed of falsehoods, invalid beliefs, and filled with the common sense of God, can we rise up out of our graves and into a new heaven.

Third, we must learn to listen to our hearts and allow God’s will to be fully revealed there.  Having gone to our Center, to feel the love of God, our minds begin to risk opening up to receive His instruction and the full knowledge of the one who Created us, and our hearts help us feel our loves, our passions, and our purpose. Our heart becomes the Way in which we will be in the world, Our minds hold the Truth of who we are and who God is in the world, and  Our Center is the Life of our inner world and the authority of our outer, temporary world…the clear and unmistakable voice of God.  This is the Trinity we must bow to if we are to be a resurrected, fully alive people. These are the three doors we must seek to open and walk through if we are to let the dead bury their dead..allowing our dead thoughts, our dead beliefs, and our lifeless stories about who we are to remain in their grave. We are on this planet to take our ordained resurrected, priestly posture in the world.

 

When we break through our limitations and experience our limitless nature in every way, we will have been resurrected.  Resurrection isn’t for one day, it is for every moment of every day.  It is a state of mind, a state of heart, and a state of being in this world. When we understand that we are free and not limited by anything of this world,  there is nothing that we can face that we can’t rise up from.  Not cancer, not death, not war, not disaster, not debt, not flood, not drought…there is no condition that we could face that has the ability to condition us to cling to fear instead of faith.  There is no condition that could convince us to believe that we have to remain in our graves and wrapped in our shrouds of death-like thinking and swaddled in lifeless beliefs.

If anything, large or small, makes you smile.  You have risen.  If anything causes you to laugh, you have risen.  If anyone makes you feel especially loved and valued, you have risen.  If you have completed a project that has been long over-do, you have risen indeed.  If your children put their arms around you and tell you how beautiful you are, you have risen.  If your husband offers to help with the household chores, you have risen.  If you are able to sit in the sunlight and just listen to the birds, you have risen.  If someone writes you a note of thanksgiving, you both rise higher.  If someone offers to watch your children so you can take a nap, you have risen.  If you decide not to take yourself so seriously today, you have risen.  If you decide to calm your mind from worries today, you have risen.  If you can thank your body for all it has done for you today, you have indeed risen!  We have the power and the grace given to us by God to make each moment, a risen one!