In Yoke

I let go my desire for security and survival. I let go my desire for esteem and affection. I let go my desire for power and control. I let go my desire to change the situation. As I walk this journey, in Christ, and seek to yield more and more of my will to His will, I find this unvarying litany returns to my consciousness on a regular basis. This is one of the ways he is teaching me to apply his life to my life, to envelop my life with the qualities of His Life. The “paradox of letting go” is a sacred alchemy. It seems that all the sinfulness and impurity in my life comes from my striving for power/control, esteem/affection, security/survival. I must decrease, while he must increase. This is true wisdom-the journey’s joy, the journey’s energies, are to come from His abundance, not from my own will’s striving. “Not my will but Thine be done”, and “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” These are Yeshua’s prayers, and indeed, I pray, are...

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them - every day begin the task anew. -Saint Francis de Sales In a village on the Blue Mountain in India, the local bank had  a very neighborly arrangement for collecting funds from the villagers.  Poor villagers have very little to save, only a few copper pennies at most. To encourage them to deposit even these few pennies every day, the bank employed a boy with a bicycle to go into the village to their homes, collect their few coppers, and enter the total in their account.  In meditation it is the same: when the Eternal Self comes, we can say, "We are no great saint, but a few times today we have tried to be patient. A few times today we have tried to put our family first. A few times today we have resisted some little craving for personal satisfaction."  This is how most of us are going to make progress for a l...