Saturday 20 February 2016

Come, sit a while, and listen to your soul speak

Hello sweet souls

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth ... And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:1-2). 

This is how the Bible starts. God spoke everything into existence ... 'and God said' ... from animals to oceans, from stars to humans, and the moon and the sun. Then on the very last page of the Bible Jesus says “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelations 22:13). 

This, to me, demonstrates that there has always been, and will continue to be, a spirit element to absolutely everything. The Spirit of God is in every single thing and every single person, from the very start until the very end.

This spiritual wisdom is ours for the taking, it is free for us to receive, if we quiet ourselves enough to hear it.

I absolutely love the spiritual aspect of life. 

In my Applied Science studies I had the opportunity to learn about Indigenous cultures, and I found the spiritual aspects of cultural studies fascinating.   

Indigenous people across the globe believed that animals, plants and everything else possessed a spiritual essence, and this belief was so fundamental to every day existence it was taken for granted and so they often didn’t even have a word to describe it.  

In Hawaiian Mysticism mana is a life energy that flows through all things and is highly individual and the Arapaho Indians believed all plants are our brothers and sisters and they talk to us and if we listen, we can hear them.

Today at Church I witnessed the Holy Spirit working as members of our congregation were incredibly encouraging towards each other.  There was a lot of ‘Great work’, ‘I really love how you...’, ‘Thank you’ and this isn’t really a common occurrence in our small country Church and it was beautiful and uplifting to witness.

I witness the Holy Spirit whenever I see somebody doing what they truly love, whether it is teaching or preaching, creating or growing, encouraging or loving, nurturing or providing.  When anything is being done with great generosity and kindness and love you know it is the Holy Spirit, because the fruits of the Spirit are ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ (Galatians 5:22-23), without the Spirit these things are incredibly hard if not impossible for us humans.

I feel the presence of the Spirit in many ordinary moment, whether I  am in nature, when my bare feet or hands are in direct contact with earth, sand or sea;  or when I am with those I love most or at Church or when I pray, meditate, or when I am smudging our home or at any time at all really.  Yet when I am stressed, worried, fearful, scared, angry or tired the Spirit seems much harder to hear.

My hope is that increasingly more of us will open our hearts and minds to the power of the Spirit, more of us will take the time to be quiet and listen to our souls, that more of us will be able to live our abundance and all of this will soon come to influence the way we manage our environment; the way we love, raise and educate our children; the way we build our economy and the way we interact and exist together locally and globally.

Poet nayyirah waheed writes:

do not disrespect your heart, by
hearing what it needs, and
giving it the opposite.


I have much hope for the future, I hope this era of denying the Spirit is coming to an end, and my prayer is that we listen more closely to our heart, and have the courage to acknowledge the power of the Spirit in our lives. 

Written with much love

Justine xx

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