Spiritual Peaces

So, I mentioned a few days ago about a book I was reading, “The Shack”. I finished it, and I’m enjoying the whirling dance of thoughts, images, and new opportunities to learn. (Thank you William for creating “The Shack” and making it available to others.)

I want to take a quote from this book (by William P. Young) and live out loud with it a little.

Wow! I really like this. While this is a belief or understanding that is served me well on numerous occasions, I’ve not ever seen it capsulized the way it is here.

Now for the living out loud part…
One of the relationship dynamics I struggle with sometimes is related to how I perceive harsh tones when someone is speaking with me. Here’s a living example.

Yesterday, when I was breaking camp, at the conclusion of my really delicious days in nature, the rain, and in quiet, my querries to aide in breaking camp were met with responses that felt harsh and bothersome. I was aksing questions ot help facilitate the ‘team work’ of breaking camp. My internal response to what I perceived as harsh and bothersome responses didn’t feel so good, at first. I felt attacked and ‘in the way’. I found myself saying to myself, “I don’t want to initiate any conversation, if this is the kind of response I’m going to get. I don’t like the way it feels, so I’ll just change what I’m doing to make it stop.”

As I began to recognize these feelings, and look at them as an opportunity to grow, I began to understand that people do sometimes snap at each other. It’s part of what makes a relationship alive and flowing, flexible and challenging. It’s not a good thing, or a bad thing. It just is what it is. While I didn’t feel so good about it at first, as I reflected, I remembered something that I read, just a day before — “Emotions are the colors of the soul; they are spectacular and incredible.”

Emotions are indeed colorful, I would say. While I wobbled through a myriad of feelings, anazylizing my responses to the feelings that bubbled up to the surface, I began to realize that this was just a very vivid example of the very thing I had read and so profoundly brought to the forefront of my consciousness.