Jim Palmer's Blog, page 60

Jesus threw in his lot with humankind.

Jesus threw in his lot with humankind.

He was one of us.

He was a stand for the divine worth and value of every person.

Religion told people they had to earn God’s love, but Jesus freely offered love without condition.

Religion told people they didn’t measure up to a holy God, but Jesus’ closest friends were people who would never step foot inside a temple.

Religion placed buildings, creeds, clerics, and rules between God and people, but Jesus opened people’s eyes to see God in all things, including each other.

Religion told people their humanity separated them from God, but Jesus insisted that his humanity was God.

Religion told people that God is a judge that shows no mercy, but Jesus created a space of grace for all people.

Religion told people that God is distant and removed, but Jesus showed that God is the air we breathe.

Jesus threw in his lot with us.

He was a stand for humankind.

The cross was his last stand.

There’s nothing wrong with you.

“I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. If you could, you would see just how beautiful you are, and the extraordinary miracle of being you. If you could climb inside of me right now and feel what I feel for and about you, you would know you are accepted and loved… all of you… just the way you are, and you would never again doubt your worth or your place in this world. Don’t confuse the word “acceptance” with “tolerance.” It’s not that you are a tolerable you. You are that priceless piece of art, that song that brings tears to your eyes, that sunset that moves you, takes your breath away and satisfies every molecule of your being. I don’t “tolerate” you, I dance and celebrate you! I wish right now you could sink down into and bask in the warmth of knowing all that you are.

But you won’t believe this about yourself. Instead, you are seeking worth, love, acceptance, security, peace, worth and happiness out there in the world. So you live in fear.

You fear failure because you have a misplaced dependency upon “success” for value and worth. You fear rejection because you have a misplaced dependency upon others’ opinions and responses to you for acceptance. You fear financial loss because you have a misplaced dependency upon money for peace and security. You fear abandonment because you have a misplaced dependency upon others for love. You fear God because you have a misplaced dependency upon religion that measures your value against your performance. You fear aging or not having the perfect body because you have a misplaced dependency on physical appearance for worth and acceptance. You fear honesty because you have a misplaced dependency on an image of having it all together for a sense of identity. You fear being a nobody because you have a misplaced dependency upon being a somebody for a sense of purpose and meaning and value.

Listen to me. Even if you could achieve all those things, they would not satisfy or fill what you long for. Somewhere out there along the way in your drive to succeed, your game of image management and pleasing others, your dutiful religious obedience, your obsession with losing weight and being thin, and carrying that monkey on your back to be special and significant or at least not found out… somewhere out there along the way in all of that you are going to lose something invaluable… yourself.

Do you get that? You’ll lose you – the you I see right now… the beautiful you, the worthy you, the good you, the loved you, the extraordinary you. Do you see? Even if, by doing all those things, you gained the whole world, you would forfeit you.

I’m going to ask something of you that isn’t going to be easy because it’s going to require you to trust me. Right now you are carrying a story inside your head about yourself that isn’t true, and you’re going to spend your entire life forfeiting yourself and losing your life trying to fight or disprove that story. I’m asking you to start seeing you through my eyes. I’m asking you to be open to the possibility that there is nothing wrong with you and never was. That you have nothing to earn, nothing to prove or disprove, that you can bury that fictitious story, and start living the truth. They say the truth is always better than fiction. See that for yourself. That other story will kill you piece by piece until there’s nothing left. But living the truth of who you are is going to open up a life of possibilities you could have never dreamed and would have never achieved out there chasing the carrot of acceptance.

There’s nothing wrong with you. There is no obstacle to overcome here except yourself. You can do this! You can step into the real story of who you are. Part of the old story is that you can’t. Not true. I wouldn’t have asked if I knew you couldn’t. Sure, it’s going to be a process. You going to have good days and bad days. But then one of those days… somewhere out there along the everyday paths of life when you least expect it… it will sneak up on you and suddenly you will indeed see yourself through my eyes.

Then we’ll both dance.”

- Jesus, Luke 9:25, Religion-Free Bible

Being yourself today is not okay.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM JIM PALMER. Being yourself today is not okay. It’s so much more than that… more than just “okay.” Being you is a beautiful thing. The world needs you to be you. The more you that you are, the better. The real you is so much better than the made-up pretend one. Leave that mask on your dresser. I … we… need the person behind that mask. Don’t hide… please. It’s not just a few parts of you… be all of you. It’s the parts that you don’t like about yourself that others often most need to experience. There’s nothing wrong with you. But we can only figure that out together. How can we love each other the way we are if we don’t express and offer who we are to others? You say, “Been there. Done that. No way; not again!” Rejection hurts. I have the t-shirt too… a closet full of them. But is there any other way, really? It takes courage to be authentic about your inauthenticity, if only to yourself. And more courage still to be yourself. So, let’s do this thing. It might not always look pretty and sometimes get messy but that’s just part of it. Come on! I’ll do it, if you will.

If you don’t tell me your religious beliefs, I won’t tell you mine.

In my mind’s eye I can see a man that harbors resentment toward me because he attaches me to a religious label that he believes represents everything he is against in the world. I’m imagining coming upon the man along the everyday paths of life and feeling his bitterness. I carry God’s love for that man and the whole world within me, and so I say to him, “Sir, sixty-five hundred Africans die every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of medicine you and I can buy at any drugstore. One million girls every year around the world are forced into child prostitution because the will to stop it pales in comparison to the will to perpetuate it. Every day one hundred thousand American children are homeless. Right now in Nashville, fifteen families with small children live in their cars. If you don’t tell me your religious beliefs, I won’t tell you mine. Right now I humbly greet and honor you in that place where you and I are one, that place of God’s love for the ‘least of these.’”

- Jim Palmer, Wide Open Spaces

Love stories are always the best ones

Love stories are always the best ones. What if all our stories are love stories – giving love, receiving love, being love? Sometimes the story is painful; we lose love; fear love; doubt love; sometimes our love is not received and even rejected by others.

I think of Jesus’ life as a love story. It involved all of the above and more. What if today is another page in the love story of your life? Be mindful of this. Be open to love today. When the opportunity comes, give love. When love presents itself to you, receive it. Be love today. Think of love as the very core of who you are.

If the story today involves hurt, feel it and embrace it and let it go. Love will appear again. People want and need love. Offer it freely and without condition. Let love be your religion today. If “God is love,” then love is divine, coming or going. Keep your eyes wide open; love shows up in many different forms. You may hear it in a song, feel it in a breeze, see it in a picture, be moved by it through a small kindness, touched by it in a simple encounter or interaction with another person. Maybe your life is a love story and this is what it has always been about – awakening a little more each day to love.

Maybe that’s what Jesus was doing, waking us up to this story… our story… the love story of our lives.

7 Things People Said About The Destructive Impact Of Religion On Women

7 Things People Said About The Destructive Impact Of Religion On Women:

“The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned, and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire. … Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.”

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths, creating an environment in which violations against women are justified. The belief that women are inferior human beings in the eyes of God, gives excuses to the brutal husband who beats his wife, the soldier who rapes a woman, the employer who has a lower pay scale for women employees, or parents who decide to abort a female embryo.”

- former President Jimmy Carter

“One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one single woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they could cease to be.”

- Sonia Johnson

“Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors.”

- Evelyn Cunningham

“The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall, so she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her.”

- Chinua Achebe

“The whole tone of church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.”

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The ritual denunciation of women constitutes something on the order of a cultural constant, reaching back to the Old Testament as well as to Ancient Greece and extending through the fifteenth century. Found in Roman tradition, it dominates ecclesiastical writing, letters, sermons, theological tracts, discussions and compilations of canon law; scientific works, as part and parcel of biological, gynaecological, and medical knowledge; and philosophy. The discourse of misogyny runs like a rich vein throughout the breadth of medieval literature.”

- R. Howard Bloch

You don’t have to travel alone

Are you seeking a closer relationship with God? Are you interested in deepening your spiritual life? Are you in need of shedding, detoxing or deprogramming yourself of religious pathology? Do you want to address the root of suffering in your life, and live in freedom and peace? Have you lost yourself, and wanting to undergo a process of deep self-discovery? Do you have a nagging sense that there must be more, and want to explore new spiritual vistas? Are you in spiritual crisis, and can’t seem to make heads or tails of God and truth?

These are a few of the reasons people have contacted me over the years for spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is a process of accompanying another person on their spiritual journey, supporting and guiding them in their desire to grow closer to God and have peace. In spiritual direction, you reflect deeply on the experiences of your daily life. You begin to recognize God’s presence and grace in your life. You come to see God or the divine present in all things. You learn to access what it means to be born of the image and likeness of God. You experience a deepening freedom, peace and contentment in your life. You become an instrument of love, peace, and compassion in the world.

Spiritual direction is really not about being directed. Rather, it is very much about being encouraged to draw closer to God. Spiritual direction invites you into this relationship whether you attend a church, mosque, synagogue, temple, or none of these. God is relevant for all people’s lives regardless of your religious, spiritual or philosophical tradition.

People come to spiritual direction for a variety of reasons, including to

- Identify and trust their own experiences of God

- Integrate spirituality into the whole of their daily life

- Live with more intention and purpose

- Share and process hopes, hurts, struggles, and losses

- Live the essence of your spiritual affiliation with integrity

- Recover themselves and become more freely self-expressed

The privilege and responsibility of a spiritual director is to journey with you as you deepen your relationship with God. The journey takes place in the context of confidential one-on-one sessions, either face-to-face, by phone, or Skype. The process involves agreeing on a convenient day and time for meeting, usually once a month for an hour or more often if you prefer.

I don’t have a set fee for partnering with people in spiritual direction. I leave it in their hands to make a freewill donation to my PayPal account for each session, being mindful that some people seek me out for spiritual direction who are not able to contribute anything financially.

In addition to this, if you are someone who has benefited from my writing, coaching or spiritual direction and want to contribute to my PayPal account in order to make these opportunities available to others, it is greatly appreciated.

If this is something you are interested in, email me at: nobody.jimpalmer@gmail.com

It hit me that Jesus’ life was filled with the same mundane realities as yours and mine.

“Reading the gospels, you might get the impression that a day in the life of Jesus went something like this:

9:00 a.m. Heal blind man

9:10 a.m. Deliver sermon

9:30 a.m. Rescue adulterous woman

9:50 a.m. Feed five thousand people

If I were to write an account of your life as a short story, I’d have to select which of your life experiences to include. What would make the cut would be those I judged to be the most significant and defining experiences. From each selection, I’d have to further decide what it was specifically about the experience that I felt was noteworthy. Because of the obvious spatial constraints of the short story format, I’d most likely have to leave out many “incidentals.”

Who cares that you went through the Starbucks drive-thru moments before that big car accident occurred and you stopped to offer assistance? And there’s really no reason to mention the ten minutes of casual chitchat you were engaged in before you launched into that extraordinarily enlightening advice you gave your friend who was on the brink of self-destruction. If I’m recounting your life in a short story, all that minutiae is unnecessary filler.

What gets lost in the translation of the life of Jesus is this filler—the incidental things that Jesus thought, said, and did—that we will never know. It’s hard for us to imagine that Jesus’ poignant talk with the rich young ruler was a five-minute encounter on his way to lunch, or that after Jesus rescued the adulterous woman, he went on to have a twenty-minute conversation with her about some mutual friends, or that Jesus’ main motivation for accepting Martha’s invitation into her home was needing to use the restroom, and fast!

It hit me that Jesus’ life was filled with the same mundane realities as yours and mine. I could plainly see that being Jesus could not mean scripting my life in a way that resembled the specifics we know about him from the gospels. Jesus wasn’t always doing something like the daily schedule I came up with implies. Applying that standard, even Jesus would fail at “being Jesus.”

We will never have the complete and full picture of Jesus’ life. You can’t squeeze thirty-something years of living into thirty-five pages—which is about the length of each gospel. Heck, you couldn’t adequately cover a week of Jesus’ life in thirty-five pages. For everything we know about what Jesus did, there’s far more we don’t know.”

-  Jim Palmer , Being Jesus in Nashville: Finding the Courage to Live Your Life (whoever and wherever you are)

And even more excerpts from Jim’s new book

“I don’t believe the axiom “A family that prays together stays together.” The divorce rate among Christians is higher than the national average. I think a better axiom might be: “A family that is determined to do their personal work in addressing their own pathologies and dysfunctional patterns, and who are together committed to learning and practicing healthy relationships with each other… has a real shot at staying together.” Likewise, reading the Bible isn’t going to solve clinical depression, bipolar disorder, etc., but the proper mental health services and medications can help in managing it.”

 

 

“You are alive but lost in a dream.

What you need is to be awakened.

A shadow of fear has been cast upon Gotham. We feel powerless against it. Every day there are countless people who feel they are making very little difference in the world. We want to know that our lives matter and count for something significant. We love our superheroes like Batman, Superman, Spiderman and Jean Grey because their existence speaks to that part of us that wishes for a great power with which to change what is wrong with the world. We never outgrow our superheroes. They keep appearing as box-office hits, reminding us of what we wish we could be.

You don’t understand the significance and power of the life you are living. The next thing you think, the next thing you do, the next thing you believe impacts everything and everyone.”

 

 

 

“There’s a “Should” program that automatically begins running at the startup of your life each day. It runs in the background of your life all day, telling you all the things you should believe and should do. This “Should” program is slowing you down on the path of freedom.”

- Jim Palmer, Notes from (Over) the Edge

Dear Jim

Dear Jim,

It’s going to be okay. Don’t stress. Do the next thing… one thing at a time. Do the best you can. Be open to the possibility of things going better than what your stress is leading you to believe. It’s within your choice to move through this day with grace and ease. Try and see everything and everyone that comes your way as an opportunity to deepen, expand, inspire, and empower you. You can’t save the world, Jim. You can’t even really “make” people be happy, and you certainly can’t live up to all the expectations the world has for you. Be centered within yourself. Keep on track with your personal work. Decide right now that this will be a day filled with goodness, beauty, love and growth. Decide that no person or circumstance can prevent this for you. Be compassionate, patient, and kind with yourself, Jim. Be aware that you are loved, and rest in that love today. Don’t resist it, fear losing it, strive for it, stress over it… just receive it, rest in it, enjoy it. It’s going to be okay, Jim. The truth is that right below all those fears and stressers… is the truth.

Love, Jim