OK, here’s where I get to be peaceful towards myself! I am giving myself permission to not have to catch up on the days I missed blogging while I was on my annual pilgrimage with my sisters! We get together for a sisters weekend every year and my focus was on them and enjoying our time together, not worrying about the blog. Therefore I granted myself special dispensation.
That doesn’t mean, however, that I didn’t learn something about practicing love and peace this weekend though. In fact, I learned a very important lesson – the more you practice the more opportunities you receive for practicing!
I had a completely unexpected opportunity to practice living from love while walking through the Atlanta airport. I was walking between gates and had two hours before my next flight. A young man in a Delta t-shirt stopped me and asked me when my next flight was. I told him the truth. At first I thought it was a survey of some sort. He started to talk about a free flight and sky miles I would receive and I looked up and saw behind him a sign about a credit card and realized what it was about. I wasn’t in a rush and he was polite and friendly so I didn’t try to escape but just stayed open and friendly in return. I’m really glad I did.
Right in the middle of what he was saying he looked down at my hand and said something about a tattoo. I realized where he was looking and was amazed he could have seen anything. I have a tattoo on my wrist but I was wearing a long sleeve shirt and a long sleeve jacket over it. I swear he would have needed x-ray vision to see it. Or perhaps he was just seeing with different eyes. So I pulled up my sleeve and showed it to him and he asked me what it meant. It is three infinity symbols with Chinese characters inside one of the infinities. I pointed to the characters and said it meant eternal grace in Chinese. I never know what kind of reaction I will get when I tell people what it means and I certainly didn’t expect the reaction I got from him.
He asked me about Grace and what it meant to me. I looked at him and he looked and sounded sincere so I began to tell him about why I tattooed eternal grace on my arm. I told him I had never found a definition of Grace that made sense to me. I told him I didn’t believe that God would grant Grace to one person and yet withhold it from another. I told him I started writing about Grace so I could better understand it. So he asked me what Grace meant to me now. I explained that for me it was about an awareness of a connection to the Divine within my heart and in the knowing of that connection allowing it to flow. I told him I think we all have access to Grace each moment but we build walls that block the flow of it. He looked at me and said, "Yes, we definitely all build walls."
I kept looking at him as we talked and feeling like there was this light shining on us right there in the middle of the Atlanta airport, like this opening of Grace had happened and it was so beautiful.
I told him writing about Grace led me to start an annual event called A Day of Grace. He asked me what we do at A Day of Grace. I told him we practice ways to take those walls down and allow Grace to flow. He asked me where I hold this event and looked a little disappointed to find it was in Virginia. I invited him to check out the website for A Day of Grace and read more about it there. I even told him that there is an email link on the site, so that after he read it he could write to me and let me know what he thought. It was a beautiful conversation and connection.
After we had talked about it for a while he looked at me and said, “I think I’ve received more from you than what I have to offer (referring to the credit card pitch) so forget about it.”
I was so deeply moved and truly hope he visits the site and writes to me. He asked for the address again before I left but I didn’t write it down for him. I will see if he follows up. It would be lovely if he does.
The whole conversation though was such a gift. I had recently been thinking about this year’s A Day of Grace, which will be happening on December 21st and here was this wonderful, unlooked for opportunity to talk about it and put the energy of it in motion.
If I had not been walking through that airport having been practicing love and peace so consciously I’m not sure I would have stopped to talk to him and taken the opportunity for a heart connection like that. What a gift I would have missed! But I didn’t miss it and I’m grateful that I have been practicing so that I could have the joy of meeting him and sharing a moment of Grace with him.
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