These lines from Helen’s early dictation have been staying with me for the past week: “There is a way of speeding you up. And that is by leaving more and more time for Me. So you can devote it to miracles.”
Time is a big issue for me. I seem to have so little of it. Basically, if I’m not at my desk, I’m taking care of little ones, and if I’m not doing either of those, it is probably between 8 and 9 at night, which is leisure time, when I am quite possibly fighting sleep. The busy-ness of my life seems to daily crowd out the things that matter most to me yet do not have deadlines (work) or crying (children) attached to them.
As I’ve pondered these lines from Helen’s notes, however, a picture has formed in my mind, one that gives me an entirely different way to go through time. In my normal picture, the center of that picture contains all kinds of duties, just a mountain of minutiae. That means I have to fit my spiritual life around the edges, if and when there is time. This new picture, however, reverses that. It is composed of three concentric circles.
The center circle is my spiritual life, my daily post-Workbook practice. If I can stay with that, making that my core focus, then I can remain in the quiet center. And then the other two circles can flow from that center.
The middle circle is what we might call miracle-working behavior. This may sound grandiose, but if you managed to read my recent article on behavior, you saw that miracles can take very mundane forms. They can be anything real that passes from us to another person and brings some amount of healing and upliftment to that person. Miracles are really supposed to pass from us to others all the time. Every encounter can be a holy encounter, in which salvation is passed back and forth.
The idea behind the first two circles is that if I can keep my focus on my practice, I can then also keep my focus on miracle-inspired relating (as the Urtext calls it). I can not just wander through my interactions, but bring my highest quality of attention to bear on them, and let something real happen, something uniting, something healing.
Then the outer circle is the minutiae, all the trivia that one has to deal with to survive in this world. That is the outer circle because, as Jesus promises, if I keep my focus on those first two circles, and turn the outer circle over to Jesus, then all that minutiae can get taken care of far more quickly and easily. My getting through it can be sped up, so that I don’t get bogged down in it. That way I can save time and then devote that time to miracles.
I am a long way from living according to these three circles. But they are what I’m holding in mind today. I’m trying to have a sense of using my practice to stay in the quiet center (first circle), so that I can then be present in a full and loving way to the people I interact with, or to the work I do that will have a real effect on others (second circle), so that I can then turn the minutiae over to Jesus and ask for his help in getting me through it quickly (third circle). I’m picturing the first two circles as the big fat ones, and the third one as a thin one around the edges.
I would love to live this way.
