Allowing Generosity to Fill You
Wednesday Wisdom.
Lately the word generosity is emerging as a theme for me. I am seeking to integrate my job as a busy part-time school librarian, with my spiritual work and writing, which I also feel called to do. Truthfully, I haven’t found a groove, yet, but I am committed to not create division in myself.
What does it mean to live a more integrated life? As I pray over this, I sense that the key might be to stay rooted in God. Today in prayer, I heard myself saying: God you are my root.
Can generosity become an orientation we hold within ourselves; can it be a way we respond to ourselves and to life? Pause and ask yourself: how am I allowing generosity to fill me? Can I see myself and life as pure gift?
God invites me to say “I am.” This is his great gift to me. This giftedness in the Spirit has a double aspect. God, in giving himself to me, gives me back to myself…In my relationship to God (focused and centered in prayer) I experience the mystery of God continually giving me back to myself.
—Alan Jones, in Exploring Spiritual Direction
To respond to myself, and others, and my life with a spirit of generosity is to honor this gift of myself, and to see myself and all of life as gift, in its deepest sense.
Perhaps, to respond to our lives in an integrated way is to keep coming back to this Gift, to the generosity of God continually giving us back to ourselves.
Practice:
- Sit in quiet today, and hold your life as a gift. What does it feel like to allow yourself to truly experience your life and all of life as a gift?
- Gaze at the photograph below and imagine yourself connected to deep roots. Pray: God you are my root.
10 ways to practice generosity today!
- Rest when you can’t sleep
- Take pressure off yourself, and remove two things from your to do list
- Give yourself a compliment
- Allow yourself not to be perfect at everything you do
- Let God love You: open your heart and feel the love
- Be compassionate over a difficult situation
- Smile and receive a smile
- Feel grateful for the rain
- Laugh at one of your obsessions
- Surrender one of your problems to God’s generosity