This Is Sparta
If you’ve been following along with my blog then you’ll know that I asked Spirit to help me love beyond the human concept of it. For the church folk I asked to love like Jesus. I made this request sober and with full comprehension, for those that understand the gravity of that statement. I recently had an experience that rocked me. The players and the tactics were all the same, nothing new arose for me to leanr this lesson. I’ve considered this situation to be like a boss fight in a video game. For all my video games, blerd enthusiasts out there you know that whenever you encounter a boss it means that you have mastered the level that you were playing and are about to level up. As someone who has been playing video games since I was a child I am all too familiar with boss fights. However I never considered that they would be real world situations. I’ve experienced adversity (as we all have) and when I look back I often wonder how I was able to make it through. *of course I know that it was God. What felt bone crushing in the moment now looks and feels like a gnat that I am able to crush with my pinky finger. I wasn’t able to recognize it then but I was going through boss fights. what was different about those fights in the past versus my current fight was that the old me would revert back to old patterns and behaviors that we not helping me.
I remained locked in narratives that kept me in a loop of unworthiness and self-blame which meant that although I was getting through the situation, I wasn’t actually mastering the level. I would then find myself repeating the same patterns but with different people and different zip codes. Solange was right, moving around did not make it better and I was often haunted by the phrase that I remember my mother telling me when I was younger. Wherever you go, there you are. I believed that I was healing from the pain but all I was doing was avoiding it. That’s not to say that I never had any healing or growth. I know I did. Most of the time, however, I was so focused on moving on. Life was continuing whether I wanted it to or not and back then I thought that I had to completely stop everything in order to heal. I couldn’t imagine doing life AND healing at the same time. But that is exactly what healing is, living.
So with this recent experience I not only slipped into my familiar pattern, I took it a step further and decided to rest in my rage. For a moment I thought about staying in that place. I’m not someone who normally goes to that place but when I do (and it’s only been a couple of times in my life when I went there) I get locked into place. I must admit that it felt cozy there. I soon found myself thinking of ways to enact revenge and plot the most diabolical plan that I could. It wasn’t even that hard. The images were flashing so quickly that I could hardly keep up. I was amazed at how easy it was to slip into the darkness. In one particular vision I could see myself thrusting my foot into a person’s chest as they fell into a bottomless black hole. I have Gerard Butler to thank for that beautiful imagery. And then I remembered something that my husband said to me the a while back. He said “this is another aspect of your spiritual warfare”. Now I’ve been on the fence about this whole spiritual warfare thing and have had many conversations with all sorts of people and the concept of spiritual warfare is split down the middle. Some believe it to be true, others not so much. I wasn’t sure how I felt until Spirit gave me a scripture to read.
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
When I look at it from the angle of spiritual alchemy and energy then this scripture would make even more sense. The moment I succumbed to the rage I was no longer living from a place of love and light. I do want to say that it was important for me to express that rage, if even for a moment. So often I was taught that anger, even rage, are emotions that have no place. It’s been within the past couple of years that I have allowed my anger and rage to have its moment in the sun. Before I thought that if I gave it enough space that it would burn the whole world down. But I just needed to release enough of the pressure so that I could let that light back in.
The boss fight was me not giving into the rage, not letting myself stay in that space longer than I needed to. Given that there is so much good stuff going on in my life I stopped and said out loud “this is a test”. I’ve mentioned before how much I hate tests when it comes to the universe but I was elated about the test this time. Normally I would have let this experience carry me into a spiral that would have lasted for weeks, maybe even months. This time I was able to recognize it for what it was, a distraction. Because that truth of the matter is that there are forces that will try and make you give into the temptation of your flesh which is not some horribly grotesque sin. NO! Giving into the flesh (to me) means giving in to the things that want to keep you distracted from your purpose. When you stay in that space yo no longer have the energy to create, to love to be in community with others. Giving in to the flesh leaves no room for compassion or grace. And that’s what it wants to do.
So Spirit did give me the gift of loving like Jesus. It doesn’t mean that it will be easy and there will often be people who will fight me and fight my cause but that should not stop me from continuing to love.