The five previous blogs have been to prepare you for the spiritual place you are going to go to, essential principles you need to understand if you are going to make the journey successfully.They are like preparing for any journey. Have you packed the right clothing for the climate you are going into? Have you packed a toothbrush and tooth paste, a passport, medication? If it is a foreign country you are going to, do you need to have vaccinations? I have been overseas a few times, plus New Zealand a number of times, and I have travelled to different parts of Australia many times by different modes of transport. Each journey needed different items to be packed.
This is just as important with a spiritual journey. You need to understand a little about the country you are going to visit. There are different needs when the journey you are making is into a place where God’s spiritual laws are in operation, and where we need to be in line with these spiritual laws so we can become free and whole. Of course, because God’s spiritual laws have been in place since the creation of the universe, we all live under His laws every day. But because we do not understand them, we do not live in accordance with them. This is one of the reasons we are not living the lives we are meant to be living.
The first article we need to have in our spiritual suitcase is to know there is a way to live that will bring us to living the life we were meant to live.
Awareness. We can liken this to having the right clothing for the journey we are about to undertake. Awareness is a quality we are able to develop.. We need firstly to become aware of what awareness is and that we mostly do not operate from this place. It is listening to the words we speak, seeking to understand our real reasons for the words we speak, watching our reactions and behaviour and again seeking to understand why they are there. Most importantly it is learning to catch our thoughts and understand them. It is the whole process of fighting the lie and you will be putting it into practice every day if you chose to go on this journey.
Then we need the right spiritual toiletries to upkeep our condition during the trip. This is the understanding that there is a way to learn on our journey that doesn’t bring shame and condemnation. A way to learn that will bring us out of dysfunctional and destructive thinking. That making mistakes is just a way of learning, the same as getting things right is.
Our passport is to understand that we are all in this together. We all live in a fallen world and suffer under the same spiritual conditions. The truth is there is a force of evil alive in the world that wants to destroy us, and there is a force of good that loves us and wants us to live happy, healthy lives. It does not matter if we are aware of these forces or not, or if we believe in them or not, they are both real and we are all affected by them.
Our medications are our heart attitudes, and the most important of these is forgiveness. It sets us free and allows God to work in the other person’s life. There are other heart attitudes we will talk about later but having forgiveness is essential.
The hardest article to have in our suitcase is to find out we cannot travel unless we can let go of those who have hurt us, and accept we need to be responsible for who we are right now, and how we live the rest of our lives. Then stop the blame. This is the vaccination we need to enter the spiritual journey.
Have you these things ready to begin your experience? Then we can prepare to leave.