Spiritual

Please Pray for Me (the church-approved, traditional, official method, though; none of that new-age hippy-dippy juju stuff.)

By: JANA GREENE

A friend I admire very much recently posted a prayer request, shortly followed by this sentiment: “Don’t bother to pray for me if you’re sending good vibes, good intentions, positive energy, etc. only God can heal me.”

It made me sad for her.

Although I am actually inclined to agree with her ALL healing comes from Source. Powers of darkness ain’t gonna heal you because you asked “the wrong way,” because darkness doesn’t heal. Ever. It can’t.

You’re either getting your healing from God or not at all, no matter how woo-woo your friends pray for you.

But advising your friends who may believe differently than you who are wanting to transfer light, love, and healing to you to “please don’t, unless you’ll do it the right way,”

It’s like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Especially when you consider that prayer IS “focused attention” – another human being imploring goodness and healing and mercy over you from the one Power who can handle it.

I’m religious circles, we call that “speaking life” over someone. And it seems a pity to reject how ever one can best send love and light for a letter-of-the-law incantation approved by the church proper.

Eastern religions have a much better grasp on this concept. We, on the other hand, almost take a Christmas Nationalist stand about it. “By GOD there is ONE way to pray for me and the Bible CLEARLY says how to do it, so don’t come in here with your weirdo ideas, which are surely demonic, since I don’t understand it.”

When we eschew good intentions that loving people bestow on us because their way of loving us is considered sub-par to your own religion, it’s a loss.

If “good vibes” won’t heal you according to your theology, where do you assume such vibes originate? Where would good, loving intentions for you come from exactly?

When we throw away their manifestations of love for us because they use the word “energy” rather “than prayer.” … we are losing something very important. The humanity of ourselves, and by proxy, the humanity of Jesus.

You are petitioning the Highest Power that exists in the entire universe for MY healing and wellbeing. And if you do so while on your knees, or with a pretty rocks in hand (even the rocks cry out, remember?) I would be honored.

In conclusion, and with a nod to Dr. Dre (wait, I mean Dr. SEUSS:)

I do so like your prayers for me,

I do so love them, cuz you see,

I’m blessed no matter how you say

“God, please make my friend okay.”

You can implore the heavens for me,

You can send me good energy,

You can go straight to Jesus with stuff,

You’re well-wishes are more than enough.

I will take your “standard prayers,”

Your meditations show you care,

Whatever is good, and kind, and true –

I’ll take that hippy-dippy stuff too!

I would love your blessings

Here or there,

I’ll except your good vibes

EVERYWHERE.

God bless us, every one.

Spiritual

Living Room Elephants, and Other Things Worth Losing

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By: JANA GREENE

We spend so much of our time trying to gain, when we should also deeply consider what is worth letting go of. Each thing you surrender makes more room in your being for love and light.

Maybe now is the time we let go of:

The weight of your own unrealistic expectations.

Okay, I’m really good at this one. Set the bar so high, I can’t even get a leg over, and then be disappointed in myself that I’m not “good enough” when I fall off the bar altogether and land on my face. Taaa-DAAA!

Believing the negative things others say about you.

This is especially hard to let go of, because I have convinced myself over a lifetime of anxiety that “they” must be “right.” But nobody gets to say what’s right about me, but me. Isn’t that liberating? You can completely ignore the BS people spread about you.

Penchant for people pleasing.

If I know you, I want to make you happy, at the expense of my own happiness, if need be. And frankly, that’s whack. I am not Chick-fil-A. It is not always “my pleasure” to put everyone else’s needs before my own.

That shitty little voice in your head is that keeps telling you you’re not enough.

It has played in a loop in my head for neigh on 54 years now. Whatever I can accomplish with my chronic illness each day is my best. Because giving my best is enough, always. It has to be.

Going beyond belief in angry God.

This shift was a game-changer for me. It reframes the entire gospel, and it is a balm to my soul. Not to mention the God of the Old Testament was very little like Jesus. Very little like Love. And my God is quite literally LOVE itself.

Wondering if it’s okay to have doubts.

Yes, it’s okay, of COURSE it’s okay. It’s faith-building, even.

Attempting to fix other people’s problems.

This is a toughie. But I’m learning. I am also learning to say, “what will be, will be,” and actually believe that things will work out just as they should, although I do this in fits and starts.

The soul-sucking monkey on your back. Or monkeys.

Our addictions hijack our focused intention, dull our shine, deplete our energy, and become a barrier to hearing from God within you.

…And the elephant in the living room.

That thing you need to address but keep stepping over, walking around, or ignoring altogether? Ask it’s name. Get to know it. And then politely show it the door.

A “Keeping up with the Joneses” mentality.

The Joneses have their own monkeys and elephants. Stay in your ring; they have their own crazy circus.

The belief that there is a separateness between you and God.

This one is a humdinger and will make all the other items easier to let go of. You are not disconnected to God, and frankly, you can’t do anything to become separate from him.

The belief that you’re all alone and we are separate from each other.

We are all connected. Every single one of us. And connected to our Source, too..

Blessed be, friends. ❤

Spiritual

Sideways and Hand-in-Hand (“The Deconstruction Poem”)

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By: JANA GREENE

What do you do

when shit goes sideways,

and the framework you’ve built on

no longer rings true?

When the system collapses

and your faith simply lapses,

and there’s no man-made doctrine

to comfort you?

There are still two left standing

when your dogma’s disbanding,

when you’ve traded the book

for a soul-searching quest.

That presence you’ve craved

that you thought made you saved

is lovingly waiting

to give your soul rest.

Let go of the striving,

give in to arriving

to a place where acceptance

is given complete.

There’s black sheep in the flock,

but we stand on the Rock

that made the “letter-of-the-law”

obsolete.

Hand in hand, you and Source

make up quite a force,

the grace of God is

all you require.

When shit goes sideways,

as it does so nowadays,

hand-in-hand,

you’ll walk out of the fire.

Spiritual

Delving into Religious Deconstruction: (Part Three – Core Values)

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Photo by Porapak Apichodilok on Pexels.com

By: Jana Greene

I thought I knew what God was like.

When I first started deconstructing my belief system – that is, dismantling all I’d been taught, and finding out for myself what I believe – I felt orphaned. Frazzled.

But the biggest mistake I made was taking on that process in the same vein I practiced religion: Fear. All my life, I’ve operated from a place of fear, and that’s no way to live out Love.

For many of us Christians, fear has been a motivator for faith since the day we hear the sweet name of Jesus. Because HELL, that’s why.

What if it’s not okay to NOT take the Bible literally? What if it’s NOT okay to feel angry at God sometimes? Maybe it’s NOT okay to doubt? Maybe I’ll burn in Hell for all eternity as punishment for expressing the curious mind God himself gifted me?

I want to know God. But I said goodbye to smiting God. And baby-killing God. And bad-mood God. And even disappointed God.

What if, instead of parroting to the whole world that “God is love,” we declare that LOVE is actually GOD. And Love is only ever good. Love looks like Jesus, who looks like God.

But it was scary at first. Like…

Feeling like God had called me into his office and was just waiting to hit the button for the trap door to open beneath me, like in a dang cartoon.

Feeling like a sink hole was going to swallow me up if I ask the wrong questions.

Feeling like I was having to diffuse a bomb without the schematics.

Feeling like I was walking in the wilderness, in a place I didn’t recognize, possibly on another planet.

Shelving my old fears did not come as an epiphany moment, but more like a gradual peeling away in layers like an onion. And like an onion, there was crying involved.

Better yet, it was like a journey into the center of the earth. I didn’t want to rehash the surface stuff – I want to know what’s at the core. And just as the Earth has layers, I moved into deconstruction under the premise that what’s at the core is what keeps everything else stable.

Science says that the Earth’ core is responsible for thew whole planet’s magnetic field, as well as plate tectonics, and many other functions. In other words, we know it’s there. We THINK we know what it’s made of. We are pretty sure what it does. We base our science on evidence, but nobody has ever traveled there and to think we understand it completely is foolhardy.

Ditto God. His ways are (very obviously) not our ways. But what if we trust they are BETTER than our own?

So, what’s at your core, God?

Are you a god of the Old Testament, angry and vengeful?

Or are you a god of unconditional love and justice, like Jesus?

Because the two look nothing alike, and I got tired of pretending they did.

Like the Emporer’s New Clothes, every other believer seemed to be dressed in their faith to the nines, expecting the King to be robed in glory, but you’re the only one who can see that he’s naked. Figuratively, of course. I ain’t trying to be weird. But at some point, I had to say, “Excuse me, ya’ll. BUT CAN YOU NOT SEE HE ISN’T WEARING CLOTHES?” In my own heart, I had to see the emperor as vulnerable and stop listening to how everyone else perceived he was dressed.

I am happy to say that coming out the other side, I choose to believe the latter. And since I’ve lived in the latter, I have peace. I finally have the spiritual peace that “it is finished” means IT IS FINISHED.

I have the ability to love ALL, without taking their ‘inventory’ and determining their worth.

I no longer just tell folks I’ll pray for them. I just DO it. And I try to be emotionally available to them myself, because how else is God supposed to love on us if not through each other? That’s how he gets shit done.

In conclusion, I’ve never physically been to the earth’s core. Nobody has. It is mysterious and no matter how we define it, we have to have faith that it will keep the Earth spinning. We will too.

But I do think I know God a little better now.

He created us to love us, and to teach us to love one another.

He keeps me close like a magnet and draws you near too.

He guides my steps as the circumstances change and shift like tectonic plates.

Excuse me, but God is wearing nothing but LOVE for you. Even if “everybody else” is “hearing from God,” has “a hotline to God,” has read the whole Bible, is a “Super Christian” in religious circles, or sits on a church committee (or seven.)

Grab my hand and let’s journey to the center of the heart of God.

The core has been cooling down since the creation of time, softening, just as his heart is soft for us; just like Jesus.

I am at the core of that heart, and so are you. He loves you to the center of your being.

At the core, there is Truth.

And the truth will set you free.

Poetry · Spiritual

Undone

Featured Jana Greene2 Comments

By: JANA GREENE

She used to be such a “good” Christian,

Proverbs 31 to the core.

But then she listened to the voice

Who told her to want more.

“More of you, God!”

She would say.

“I’m striving hard, you see!”

“”Why are you striving

So hard, child,

Cannot you simply be?“

The war she fought within herself

Had already been won.

And when she finally

Understood,

She became undone.

“But I must be holy” she said.

And pleasing to your sight!”

“Have I not told you, child,

You’re already salt and light?

And do you not remember,

I’ve already

Won the fight?”

And in the end of warring,

She was learning just to be.

Slowly,

And with great surrender,

She realized she was free.

Spirituality

Thimble Theology vs. Cosmic Conviction

July 15, 2022July 15, 2022 Jana Greene6 Comments

By: JANA GREENE

Hi, my wonderful Reader.

Who else is straight trippin’ over the images from the James Webb telescope released this week? Because I’m in AWE, with a capital “A.” I have to tell you that that my Spirit is even more impressed with them than my brain, which is amazed. And it has renewed by faith on a cosmic scale.

For a couple of decades, I have occasionally had a recurring dream that I am flying through outer space, and as I’m soaring, I am awash in an incredible feeling of warmth and belonging. Floating and gliding at peace in a place of unimaginably bright-colored celestial bodies against a black sky that was somehow NOT dark… endless planetary bodies around me, and they are both a million miles away and a part of my own body, simultaneously. It’s my favorite dream. I wish I had it more often.

Ever have those “this is so realistic; I must be dead and in Heaven” dreams? Even in my dream-state, I’m cognizant of fact that the sheer vastness and twinkling stars and planets should (by measurement of my earthly anxiety) make me afraid. But I’ve left the earthly plane and don’t give two hoots about the utter INFINITENESS. It isn’t scary. I am home.

Can I better describe this dream venue for you? I can. By showing you the pictures of our Universe that were captured by the telescope. As I told my therapist whilst recounting seeing the images for the first time, “I’ve BEEN to there!”

I used to be able to hold my theology in a thimble. It was laid out to me by my ancestors, and their ancestors – a set of beliefs that were true because I was told they were, and I’m a people pleaser above all else. I didn’t know it was in a thimble – I thought it was quite encompassing. There were rules and doctrines and to question them was a sin, so I didn’t question. But the evangelical world and its gospel of exclusion started to gnaw on my soul. It didn’t sit well, but OH WELL. WHAT CAN YOU DO? God was loving but stern, bound by his own doctrine and narrow in his thinking. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t exit the spacecraft.

But love doesn’t operate that way. God doesn’t operate that way.

You cannot define his love within the bounds of a dogma, or a book, or a patriarchal gospel. I know this to be true because when my thimble spilled the contents of its conviction, the enormity of his love pummeled me. I started basking in nature – Creation – and really SEEING it. I’ve even hugged a tree or two. I stopped taking everyone else’s inventory. I stopped inquiring if people who were not like me were “worthy.”

What is the point is a Creator who keeps expanding the Universe, but not our minds and hearts?

So today I soar.

The deconstructing of my birthright faith was brutal, I’m not going to lie. I took apart everything I’d learned piece by piece, in order to learn for myself what was true. I had to get to the root of what MY heart truly believed, which – if I’m honest – was fear-based. Imagine my delight when Jesus met me right where I was, gathered me under his divine wings, and comforted me with truth.

My God isn’t bound by 2,000 years of human dogma. He isn’t bound by cannon and law. His law is the law of the whole Universe – the one I’ve soared through in my dreams. The one who keeps expanding holy territory around us and IN us. There is nothing narrow about his vast love for you. The same hand that keeps spinning the cosmos is living in YOU.

I think that’s pretty far-out.

Acceptance · blogging · Brokenness · Christian writers · Christianity · chronic illness · Depression · Enough · God · God · Healing · Hope · Inspirational · Spiritual

Faith Reconstructed (or, I think I’m ready to write again…)

January 29, 2020January 29, 2020 Jana Greene4 Comments

black and red typewriter — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

By: Jana Greene

Hi, my name is Jana and I’m a writer.

Sometimes, I forget that.

I used to write quite prolifically, and about everything.

As a matter of fact, this is the 475th blog post on The Beggar’s Bakery.

Sometime in the past few years, I’ve misplaced my writing mojo, which is to say that I’ve slipped into committing the cardinal sin of true creativity, which is to worry more about what people might think of me than to have confidence in what I have to say.

I think I started writing less when a series of unfortunate events took place, namely the catalyst for me to question, test, and try the faith that I’d inherited from my ancestors and never outwardly doubted.

It started when I got sick, and stayed sick. It started when well-meaning churchy people attempted to cast demons out of me (no, really) that weren’t really demons, but infirmary. The thing about sickness is that it is actually more threatening than demons to religious people, of whom I was chief amongst. After endless rounds of being prayed for, having “deliverance” ministries, and demon casting, well… it turns out that my illness is genetic, and while God CAN and DOES heal instantly, that was not the case for me, which led me to one of two conclusions:

1. I was doing something wrong and was a fundamentally flawed Christian. Or

2. God isn’t real. Healing isn’t real. My life is based on lies.

Now, I’m all about that – laying on hands and praying in Jesus name. That is GOOD STUFF. We should always aspire to heal one another. We should always ask for our own healing and petition God to heal others. It’s just that when it doesn’t happen the way our religious leaders aspire it to, it leaves us in a spiritual lurch.

A few funny things happened on my way to figuring out that neither of those conclusions are true. It’s kind of a long story, and I’ve taken to the blog to tell it piecemeal, as best I can, whether anyone reads it or not. For a long time, this blog was my sanctuary, where I came to be raw and real. Then I underwent this huge physical and spiritual metamorphosis, and I wasn’t the chipper writer with a fast answer and scripture reference to throw out there anymore.

And I stopped writing here because that little Southern baptist girl inside told me that I had NO right to pen a blog that claims to be “one beggar telling another where she found bread,” because I am not a conventional evangelical anymore. Sickness changed me, yes. But the spiritual angle changed for me in ways I can scarcely count. What if So-and-So thinks I’m a big, fat heathen because I ascribe to this hippy-dippy, love one another craziness that has taken the place of my rigid, religious persona?

I guess that’s what they’ll think, then.

God and I are square, more than ever.

There was a time that I was sure my calling was to be a mom. And then my kids grew up; they still need me, but in a different way. I was sure I was called to be an artist, and poet, and for a season, I was. For many years, I thought my calling was to minister to recovering alcoholics, and that is still true. Those things will always be parts of my mission.

But here’s what nobody warns you about: Our “callings” change. They morph. We are always called to something new because Papa LOVES opening our eyes to the NEW!

So I guess for the foreseeable future, The Beggar’s Bakery will again be sanctuary for my words. Because I badly need to get these feelings out, and why not bring along 1,940 of my closest friends with me?

It isn’t a pretty journey.

It isn’t even a COMPLETE journey.

Just a leg of the trip, replete with all the joy, angst, confusion, acceptance, and hope I can muster and share with my readers.

This revival is for the doubters. It’s for the broken-hearted, and the disenchanted. It’s for those who always feel that they fall short of the glory of God, and the expectations of men. It’s for the marginalized and the giver-upper. It’s for the real people, the ones trying to figure out and complicate what is really, really simple – that God is Love itself and YOU are an expression of that love to the entire universe.

I’m still struggling with a lot, so don’t look to me to feed you in whole – to hand you the Bread of Life – the truths, mysteries, and answers. But I CAN tell you where to find that bread still. The Bakery is open – loaves and fishes for all.

It’s all love.

Til’ tomorrow….