A POWERFUL FRESH APPROACH TO SPIRITUALITY
Focus
From the new book, PRESENCE Recognizing the Divine in Your Everyday Life
by Mary G. Jackson
As I was writing PRESENCE Recognizing the Divine in Your Everyday Life, I came upon some ideas that seemed to form a foundation for my experience of the Divine. I called these philosophical and spiritual ideas, Concepts. Currently, 22 concepts have become the framework upon which PRESENCE is built. We are exploring the second concept; The Divine will appear to you in ways that only you recognize. We will be looking more deeply into how focusing can help you recognize the Divine. With concentration, practice, and a different way of looking at things, you might open yourself to a more personal connection with the mystery we call God.
On a trip to the Grand Canyon, a spiritual place for many, I arrived by airplane at the Phoenix, Arizona, airport. My friend told me we would have to rent a truck to get our gear to the campsite we had reserved because my friend’s truck wasn’t working.
On the way to the campsite, it started to rain, and we discovered that the rental truck’s windshield wipers didn’t work. We had to keep going because we needed to get to our destination before nightfall. My friend didn’t want to drive with the rain causing an almost impossible obscuring of our view of the road, so I took the wheel to give it a try.
Knowing how important it was for us to get to our camp without any plan or experience, I focused not on the drops of rain on the windshield but between the drops. I forced myself to look at the road through the clear spaces. After a while, to my surprise, it became almost normal to see the road ahead. My friend was amazed that it was so easy for me and remarked about how different a perception it was to choose to look not at the obstacle, in this case, the raindrops, but through or beyond it.
It matters what you focus on. It might involve looking differently at what has been in front of you for a very long time. It might mean focusing on what might have been ignored until now. Just as focusing on the spaces between the raindrops gives a clear view of the road ahead, perhaps focusing on something you might have missed up until now might free you to recognize the Divine, the clear path, and the way forward. It certainly may not be helpful to allow the obstacles (raindrops) that obscure the view to be the focus of your attention.
In the next issue of A POWERFUL FRESH APPROACH TO SPIRITUALITY, we will look more deeply into having a purpose, goals, or mission that is life changing.
© 2022 PRESENCE Recognizing the Divine in Your Everyday Life