Restoration Church

07/09/2021

06/26/2021

May 21, 1968 Back at Gethsemani: “I, for one, realize that now I need more. Not simply to be quiet, somewhat productive, to pray, to read, to cultivate leisure…There is a need of effort, deepening, change and transformation. Not that I must undertake a special project of self-transformation or that I must “work on myself.” In that regard, it would be better to forget it. Just go for walks, live in peace, let change come quietly and invisibly on the inside. But I do have a past to break with, an accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk, a great need of clarification of mindfulness, or rather of “no mind”—a return to genuine practice, right effort, need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the Spirit. Hang on to the clear light!” - Thomas Merton

05/26/2021

“Spiritual Baggage”

Today I have realized that I continue to put energy and time into old thought patterns. I continue to attempt to prove to others that my transformation was and is real, I subconsciously seek to destroy my former way of thinking by waging mental and emotional violence against it repeatedly. I now realize that light doesn’t need to fight darkness, it needs only to illumine and the darkness ceases to exist.

It is in stepping into the new, that the old falls off. We no longer need to waste precious time, energy, and resources into justifying our change to others, rather- all of our energy and focus should be in the “living out” of the freedom of the internal transformation we have experienced, because until we allow ourselves to be free from the baggage of the past we will be grasping them as symbols of our slavery which mentally and emotionally drain us and doesn’t allow our spirit to truly live in the freedom it aches for.

05/23/2021

In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.

And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.

The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day.

Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.' "