Seeing all of Life as Sacred
By: White Dove
My favorite place in the world is a long, winding dirt road running alongside the Vermillion River in Northwestern Montana. The wilderness is my sacred space, and home to beavers, otters, muskrats, golden eagles, a whole chorus line of bull frogs, and of course, mountain lions and bears of all shapes and sizes. We built our house on the Vermillion River, a waterway which noisily rushes down into a turquoise bay surrounded by cliffs, because it was peaceful.
Peace is what our family needed most after walking the high tension wire of ten surgical procedures following my husband’s severe spinal cord injury. There appeared to be no positive outcome, on the physical side of life. My husband was still suicidal and on very strong narcotics, and the crystal clear Vermillion was the healer that carried away my anxieties and fears and exchanged them for peace and contentment. I think it helped my husband, too.
He used Morphine, Oxycontin, Percosett and a host of other drugs, while I was enduring pain of a different kind, and perhaps even worse, but I had no drugs. Instead, God used the beauty of nature to heal my fractured soul.
There is healing in every aspect of nature. You don’t have to live in the wilderness to find this healing. All it takes is a few moments of time, to savor the moment wherever you happen to be.
The Lakota people once taught me to hug a tree, and that in hugging a tree you release the negative energy from whatever stress you’ve been holding onto and the tree absorbs it, giving back to you positive energy.
Creation is full of cycles, flows and exchanges of energy. For example, humans breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. There is a mutually beneficial exchange, a harmony.
Or take sunflowers… they absorb heavy metals and radioactive materials, cleansing our ecosystem!
It’s not about worshiping the creation, but learning to respect how our Creator set these systems in place to relieve our stress and to increase our personal enjoyment of our earth experience. We can work with the earth instead of against it.
Life was meant to be a lot easier than we’ve made it to be!
My husband and I were only 40-some years old when life as we had known it ground to a sudden halt. Not only had we lost our jobs and moved to the wilderness after years of medical drama, but we had also exited organized religion. In leaving the institutional church, there is usually an “upside down” period of time, where you feel the pain of loss, but you don’t yet know what to replace it with.
Half the time you’re second-guessing yourself and the other half you’re running back to the institution, seeking an upgrade, a possibly better “alternative” church!
What if the Way, the Truth, and Life itself is found in a Person instead of an organized religion? What if that Person said you had to become like a child to understand how to walk in The Way? What if He doesn’t give a hoot if you “worship” in a building or if your whole life is a worship center?
Can it be that knowing God is as simple as walking and talking with Him every day? Like a child with her hand in her Daddy’s hand, exploring the world together?
What if our simple, everyday life became a spiritual experience? What if every moment became sacred? What if every place became sacred ground?
My new church is the whole wide world outside of me, and the whole dynamic world inside of me. That doesn’t mean I won’t attend one of the meetings-in-a-building kind of church. It just means I’m learning to live worship as my lifestyle. For me, it means that all of life is sacred. No more “secular” vs “sacred”.
In some ways, it’s a challenge to live in freedom, just as living in the mountains and walking in the wilderness can be challenging. You keep expecting someone to tell you what to do! You have to exercise your own wisdom and discernment, a spiritual muscle that doesn’t need to be used very often inside the church system.
There is sacred space within our own hearts, that place where our Father and Christ reside. It’s a place of freedom. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us, is something I’m only beginning to embrace. It’s a big enough mystery to keep me engaged the rest of my life!
Freedom is different than religion. It’s making every moment, every space, everything sacred. It’s walking and talking with God as a lifestyle. It’s experiencing daily provision with the labor of your own hands, by the grace of God. It’s a wide open space full of lessons to be learned that cannot be found in books, unless you write the book yourself!
You can never predict who or what will show up to teach you your next lesson. It might be a moonflower or a sunflower or your cranky next door neighbor. It’s an earth journey that makes every day exciting!
Whatever you stumble upon today holds a life’s lesson, a lifetime of lessons, if you stop and take a moment to ponder, to listen, to watch, to walk with God, hand-in-hand. And like children do, we stop, look, and listen to whatever grabs our attention and we ask our Papa questions. And we walk and talk some more. We play. We rest. We share our stories with each other.
Contact me Kind Words from Readers What I Believe My Story
With all my love,
White Dove
Hi, I’m White Dove. Yes, it’s my pen name, and it was given to me by a blind man who shyly whispered it to me in a Divine encounter. Yes, it’s my real picture… just an ordinary selfie.
I live with my family in the mountains, surrounded by ancient forests, pure streams, and mighty rivers… but I also travel quite a bit.
My kingdom career is a Heart Scribe. I love to write from God’s heart and have been recording His living Word for the past three decades. It’s brought me so much beauty, joy, peace, and happiness!
I love to inspire trauma survivors to write their life stories, unearthing the treasures of their past and sowing them into the future. We dip our pens in blood and write the pain away… as God has shown me how to do, in the company of supportive friends and family. We are writing ourselves into a better world, beginning with discovering our own original design recorded in the DNA of our soul, and it’s the most exciting place to be!
Copyright © 2018 Heart Scribes, All rights reserved. For reprint permission or for any private or commercial use, in any form of media, please contact me.
media, please contact Susan Schiller.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
“Our hope for the future lies… in our willingness to do without.” Like the church in Corinth, many of us in well-to-do US congregations consume and hoard such a quantity of material goods that our way of life directly conflicts with the biblical mandate to gather only as much as we need, not to mention loving or caring for our neighbor as we care for ourselves. Thus, the time has come for us to ask not only what we can give but also what we may need to give up. For, if growth will not eradicate poverty, the only other option is a fairer sharing of resources between those with abundance and those in need.
I am looking for a tree to hug now. 🙂
The sacred, even saying the word out loud, is like worship. Jesus in us… we are standing on sacred ground. Set apart… sacred. Contentment… sacred. And yes, joy… sacred.
Thanks!
Thanks, Linda 🙂
{ 16 trackbacks }