Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 8

June 10

God is always saying to us, “If you will give me everything, I will give you everything.” ~Betty

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

Within the great mystery of Christ lies the timelessness of a transcendent bond. To those of us who believe, it is known as Spirit. Ever more intimately, this Spirit becomes known as a Person, a Living Presence who is powerfully awakening and binding us together by the gentle threads of an unspeakable Love.

Prayerfully, the struggle and pain and the vulnerability of my own spiritual quest have touched your heart, kindling a spark that will encourage and enlighten others. To be nourished by Him through one another is life’s greatest gift and most beautiful treasure. Will you begin now to discern the Spirit of Christ calling you to drop the walls that have too long separated you from the hearts of others? Will you choose to become more vulnerable, more intimate, and more generous with yourself so you create a safe place for them? Our dear Lord is calling you to come up higher—to a more intimate bond with those He has given you to know.

To know another in deepest friendship, we ask God to unravel the mystery of their heart to us. In doing so, we find that the mystery of our own hearts begins to unravel to us as well. We see ourselves as others see us and thus can begin to dismantle our false selves to discover our authentic selves. Now, through Christ, we can offer our true and deepest self to them, becoming real friends in thought, heart, and spirit. To be open and safe and ever-loving in all of our relationships is the freedom and utter joy our Lord promises if we will begin the work to claim it.

On this quiet morning in this extraordinary moment in time, you, my dear friends, fill every abyss of my heart’s love and longings. All of my pain, all of my life’s hurts, heartaches, struggles, and surrenders, all of my prayers have become priceless as I offer them back to Jesus and through Him to you. May you become ever more disciplined, ever more discerning, ever more obedient, ever more intimate with Him who offers life in total abundance. 

In the warmth of His recreative Love, I remain your faithful friend. ~Betty

Will you pray with me now in the intimate bond of God’s fathomless love?

May 27

When the Giver of Love becomes the Receiver of Love, our movement from bondage to freedom is complete. Beauty awakens in us.~ Betty

Come Up To The Higher Places

David Hockney. Garrowby Hill

Nothing on our spiritual journey is ever final; it is an ongoing process moving us higher and higher. It is a continuous change and movement from what is good, to what is better, to what is best. Most of us stay in the good and never attain the better or the best because the inner work of change is difficult, our fear is so great, and there are so few people who can help us find the way.

The Hidden Life Awakened pp104-105

Jesus, you opened the doors of heaven to me when you cried out from the cross, “It is finished.” You paid the price for me, your beloved. Now, I sense your call to set aside the things that so easily entangle me and come with You to the higher places. To do this, I have to change. Change and growth are synonymous. Seeing and letting go of the distractions and sins that so easily ensnare me and returning again and again to the quiet with you is how I will find my way into the Holiest. There are so many wonderful words in the world calling me to change, but I find there is no power in them—they speak only to my mind and emotions. Words that emerge from the depths of Your great heart create what they speak. You spoke light into the cosmos. I know that if I listen and open to whatever and however you choose to speak to me, reflecting again and again on new understandings, trusting them enough to take another step towards you, I will finally turn and see that I have moved to a better, higher place. Everything around me has changed for the better. That doesn’t mean that anything or anyone else has changed, but I see them differently because I see with new eyes—God’s eyes.

Your dear friend and disciple, Mary of Bethany, sensed something of your glory and yearned for deeper understanding. When you arrived for dinner in the home she shared with her family and your good friends, Lazarus and Martha, both women were busily working in the kitchen. When Mary saw you come in, she immediately left the work to sit at your feet and listen. Martha, in exasperation, said, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to come help me!” Your answer to her was, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken from her.”  1 What Martha was doing was good and necessary but it was keeping her from the best.

Again in Bethany, you were having dinner at another home with your closest friends just before Passover. Mary quietly slipped in with the alabaster jar of extremely costly perfume her family had been saving for her wedding. Without a word, she broke it and poured it over your head, filling the room with its glorious fragrance and scandalizing the group assembled there. Everyone jumped up in shock at such a recklessly extravagant act…except you. They scolded her harshly, saying, “What a total waste! That could have been sold for a lot of money to help the poor.” Only you understood that hers was a radical and holy gesture of devotion and highest understanding—she was anointing you for your death. The others loved you and were totally committed to doing your good work, but the tragedy was that their focus was so limited that they missed the best. Over and over, Mary had chosen to tune out the world’s noise and deeply attend to you with an open heart and open mind. Her intense desire had moved her to a higher place. Then you said to the others and all of history, “Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me…she has done what she could; she has anointed my body for burial. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” 2

It takes both the service of an active Martha doing God’s work in the world and the deep meditation and prayer flowing through a contemplative Mary to draw people into the community of Love. My prayer is coming to receive your love, and my action is going out to offer it to the hungry hearts of others. If I do both, all of my service will become prayer, and all of my prayer will become service. In deep humility, then, I will move up the high mountain with you and reclaim the heavenly life that awaits me.

May 13

You have not been left to endure life’s sorrows and temptations alone. ~Betty

The Great Heart of God

Vincent Van Gogh. The Good Samaritan. Kröller-Müller Museum.

The broken heart is the place where the mystery of God’s great love seeks entry. God addresses my fragile heart through the gentle language of mercy and compassion that is relational and deeply, deeply intimate. All of my pain, grief, loss, and confusion, all that I have done and failed to do, is embraced by forgiveness so gentle that I can only surrender and allow myself to be held in the fertile soil of God’s tender and compassionate heart.

God’s tender suffering birthed the life of Christ among us. Knowing that we could never grasp with our finite understanding the enormity of His infinite love, God sent His son, our brother, Jesus, to manifest it. Jesus willingly stepped down from the throne to take on humble flesh and walk with us in our broken world. When he saw crowds of people, Jesus’ heart was deeply moved with compassion, because they seemed weary and helpless, like wandering sheep without a shepherd.1 When Mary, fell at His feet weeping over the loss of her brother and his dear friend, Lazarus, Jesus shuddered with emotion and was deeply moved with tenderness and compassion—tears streamed down His face.2. He met a funeral procession carrying the body of a young man to the cemetery. The boy was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow. When the Lord saw the grieving mother, his heart broke for her. With great tenderness, he said to her, “Please don’t cry.” Then he stepped up to the coffin and touched it, calling her son back to life.3 When we see Jesus’ heart, we see God’s heart—for God is Christ-like.

Jesus showed how far Love was willing to go by accepting the vilest humility and torment—the cross. His resurrection opened the glorious possibility of new life in deep friendship with the great heart of our ever-near Shepherd, Who is endlessly calling and searching for us who have all lost our way.

Jesus, come be with me in my passion. I accept the way of fertile suffering and will allow the process of purification to etch its way through my hardened heart, so I can feel and hold the pain of others in Love’s great strength and compassion. I want to step down from my pain-filled selfhood so that your compassionate life can be birthed in me—a life that is toward and for the other. Open in me the capacity to be in relationship, to receive, to be touched, and to relate to a world beyond myself. Expand that place in the center of my being that stretches to love and be loved, to know and be known, to be free and set others free—that place that moves towards purity, simplicity, and innocence.

Spirit of Christ, awaken the awareness in me that God is the life of us all and that we are one in God together. This possibility of oneness means blending my tears with the world’s in a compassionate way that heals and creates community. Free me to open my life to others in generous willingness to be known—to tell my story of suffering, and to listen to theirs. “I share your wounded place. Your tears run down my face too. Your suffering aches inside my heart.” I relive their pain and, by reliving theirs, I relive my own and God’s. I become a place of nourishment for others, quietly holding their pain and their healing up to the great heart of God, sharing their sufferings in the holy act of compassion.

April 29

There is not one thing you can do to change another person, but there is an awful lot you can do to change you. ~Betty

Use Your Pain To End Your Pain

David Inshaw. She Did Not Turn.

Over the infinity of space and time, the infinite Love of God comes to possess us. We can consent to receive or refuse. Surprisingly, this Love offering comes in the form of suffering—in the image of the nail. The high cost of consent intuits our refusal. Finite vision sees no purpose in pain.

Suffering has so much to teach us. It is not a punishment but the divine route to complete rest in God. It is a call to faith, a test of character, a means of loving guidance, an encouragement to prayer. If we can see our sense of suffering as sharing, in a small way, in Christ’s passion—His willingness to surrender in trust to that which He was called to live—we too will be graced with the strength to embrace it and learn from it. We must embrace the travail of our own inner transformation before we can see others with the eyes of Christ’s own patient compassion. By embracing and accepting our pain, we begin to break through the protective walls we have constructed around our hearts for so long, becoming more vulnerable, honest, and grateful. This moves us to a deeper understanding of our shared brokenness, opening us to a compassionate dimension within our hearts. Slowly, we begin to change in two powerful ways: we become more and more self-compassionate while becoming more accepting and compassionate toward others, and we wake up and focus on all of the good surrounding us, becoming more grateful and accepting of our lives. We awaken to the truth of our lives and begin to see reality as it is rather than the way we think it should be or wish that it were. Once we choose to see this with the eyes of trust, we are no longer living in illusion, and God can graciously begin to heal us.

Painful relationships and circumstances that seem so defeating and discouraging are most often sacred gifts holding the seeds of our healing if we will embrace them, persevere through them, and allow them to change us and wake us up to a whole new way of seeing. So often when we are suffering, we run from one thing to the next, frantically looking for a quick fix that will ease our searing pain and restore things to the way they used to be. However, God is not seeking restoration but transformation. The more we submit to and participate in the mystery of this purifying work, the more we begin to experience a sense that everything, even our darkest pain, is held in Divine Love.

Excerpted from The Hidden Life Awakened pp 22-23,25

Beloved, embrace me in the dark night of my praying, in the deep silence of my offering, in the confrontation of my dying.  Beloved, enable me by faith to know You without seeing You, by hope to possess You without feeling Your presence, by love to desire You above all desires.  Beloved, grant that I might put all faith in love for You, all hope in love for You, to know that all desires fail but one: my desire to be loved by You. BWS

For more videos of Betty, click here.

April 15

Our deepest suffering comes from the way we perceive and label the things we carry in our hearts. ~Betty

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

As I look back on my life’s journey—and retrospect is such a beautiful view—I have learned that our times of darkness and pain reveal and illuminate the mystery and beauty of our true self hidden within. Faith is a pilgrimage of the heart, a walk in the dark. It is an endless letting go toward the Light. Faith carries us along on a tide of God’s promises beyond the mire and desolation of our own despair. It is God ringing our hearts like a bell, a holy summons asking us to take the next step into the unknowing.

I have been through the dark and lonely places, but I also have come to know the One who continues to lead me through them. As we choose to embrace the joys and the sorrows of each necessary season in faith and trust, the fog shrouding our soul slowly lifts and we behold, as in a glass, His glory and our glory in Him. Gradually then, we begin to mirror this eternal light of Love, claiming our true nature. 1

To live in communion with Jesus is to live in the flow of divine relationship with all that it has to offer us. And what it offers is the mystery of resurrection into life out of death, love out of pain, ecstasy out of agony, light out of darkness, and power out of poverty. After all these years, I still can’t explain it, but I can tell you that it is so because I have experienced it.

Prayerfully, may my story be an encouragement and light on the path as you journey homeward. ~Betty

Sweet Love, my dearest Treasure, I feel the movement in Your prayer, the intensity of Gethsemane, the pain of Calvary, Your passion, the agony You suffered there. Drops of sweat, a flood of tears have touched my hair, have washed the wrinkles of my days, have set my heart ablaze.   Sweet Love, all my wanderings Have been Your stepping stones. the ocean shore, the forest floor, the mountain trail, the Truth the lake revealed, were but glimpses, time alone to set my sails, to unravel some of what will always be a mystery: the wonder of Our Oneness, Your Presence in my twilight years.   Sweet Love, my dearest Treasure, Love of all loves, Love Divine, in You I know Love without measure.BWS