Note: Before reading today’s tip, read Acts 10:9-22 from the Bible or watch all of Acts 10 from the Visual Bible movie, Acts.
Today’s reading is about the undoing that occurs through guidance. Our personal self-identity—our attachment to who we think we are, to the mind-made laws we believe, and to other personal beliefs and values—is undone through guidance. It is important to realize that, or else we may expect guidance to be something it isn’t.
Guidance is not God’s way of meeting our expectations and giving us what we want.
For example, imagine that you work as a professional computer programmer, but your dream is to be an off-the-grid hippie-like farmer. You may hope that God’s guidance will give you the money you need to become financially self-sufficient, so you can buy some land, build a farm and live your dream without worrying about money. However, what you want from guidance comes from your ego—from your idea of who you are, what you want and how you want it done. Guidance will not reinforce your ego.
Peter was raised as a Jew. He was taught to follow Jewish law. He identified with being Jewish. Yet, guidance came to Peter asking him to break Jewish law by eating animals that Jewish law prohibits. He was also guided to associate as an equal with gentiles. All of this guidance was part of undoing Peter’s identification as a Jew.
If you have always dreamed of being an off-the-grid farmer, it is possible you will one day be guided to off-the-grid farming. Sometimes our dreams and our callings are one. However, the way it comes about through guidance will be a path of undoing, not the dream exactly as your ego envisions it.
For example, all my life I dreamed of being a writer and a teacher, but I did not imagine it the way it has worked out through guidance. I thought I would write best-selling novels and teach elementary school children.
I also dreamed of living in Colorado. I gave up that dream years ago, because I realized it was a personal attachment. I settled in North Carolina in a town that I swore I’d never live in. I moved there when guidance took me there. I lived there four years and was prepared to stay in that town happily for the rest of my life when a dream came unexpectedly with guidance to move to Pueblo.
We cannot predict guidance, but we can expect it to be an undoing of who we think we are. It’s best if we take all of our hopes, dreams, desires, values and attachments, and toss them to the wind. If something blows back as the gift of guidance, it is meant to be a part of this unfolding; if it doesn’t, it was merely ego.
It reminds me of a saying that was on a poster that hung in my room when I was a teenager:
If you love something, set it free.
If it comes back, it’s yours.
If it doesn’t, it never was.
Don’t play the game of imagining what guidance might be for you. That imagining will come from ego. Instead, focus on letting go of ego. Let guidance be a surprise, and follow it even if it seems to be different from what you want, just as I followed it to a little town in North Carolina where I had sworn, more than once, I would never live.
Note: The next tip will be available tomorrow morning after 3:50am ET at this link.
