Let’s face it. We are smack in the middle of what seems like a never-ending stream of violence on our planet. Let’s face it. No one is beyond having a shooting occur in their very own neighborhood. Let’s face it. This is sad and frightening to most of us. Let’s face it, on some level we feel helpless to stop any of it. So now what?

Yesterday, I heard things like “I don’t want your prayers.” I was asked “Where is God in all of this?” I totally understand that many of us our at our at our wits end as to what to do. We are in pain. We are scared. We are feeling helpless.

No one is asking us to not feel deeply. But, frankly I do not know what else to do but pray. I pray for understanding. I pray for healing. I pray to be able to see through all of this and stand strongly in Faith. I have Faith because I have dug deeply to find it. I didn’t find it by looking out, blaming an outside God or giving up. I just kept going. I have my trials and tribulations, but I just kept digging deeper and deeper into the only place I know and that is within my own heart.

What I discovered and continue to discover is that God is in all of this. God never goes away because God/Life/Source/Power is right where I am experiencing everything. God cries. God gets mad. God sometimes feels helpless. However, above it all and through it all, God, as me, knows that experiences come and go, but there is something that never changes. It is the deep knowing and peace of God that is ever available in the midst of everything.

I have Spiritual Mind Treatment that helps me to center my heart and mind in the knowing that this is all an experience that is real, but is not the ultimate Reality. Harsh experiences can, if we allow them, bring us deeper into the answers of life and closer to the Spirit of Love that lives and breathes us. When we seem to reach rock bottom is where many of us find transformation.

What if we didn’t know everything about everyone else? What if we didn’t know why those particular 12 people were killed in Thousand Oaks? What if we didn’t know their eternal story? What if they weren’t dead at all? What if the pain we feel was Love, deep love. What if we knew that there was a relief to all of this in the power of Life/God within us?

I am at a retreat right now in the High Desert of New Mexico with Gregg Braden and Bruce Lipton. Yes, I have a different perspective because I am what seems like above it right now, but there is more and it came to me strongly yesterday. In order to be able to thrive in this chaos, we have to work on our inner strength. We cannot just take a class or listen to a talk and then expect to change our ability to have faith or to stay strong in these difficult times. We have to actually seek to use what we learn and use it again and again. We have to keep praying and keep studying.

All the answers  lie within each of our hearts and nowhere else. They could take away all the guns, all the politicians, and remove violence from the world, and we’d be left with one thing – our own responsibility to know ourselves and who we are. It was written long ago above the temples of ancient ones: “Know Thyself.” History repeats itself and will continue to do so, until we know something differently…really KNOW IT.

Do you know yourself? Do you know how special you are? Do you know that you came here with the capacity to heal? Do you know that your are not a random act of a big bang, but a conscious being with choice of how you are going to react and perceive your experiences? Do you know that you can actually change your experiences by your perception of them and taking care of your own mind? Do you know that you are the very Creative Force of Love? Have you given up on yourself and then expect everyone else to stop the atrocities? It’s impossible!

I’m facing it all and what I know for myself is the only thing right now for me to do is to pray, not a prayer of beseeching, but a prayer announcing that life is good. That God is here. That love reveals itself now. That peace already exists with all the tools to bring it forth. The only thing for me to do is to find God in all of this. The only thing for me to do is to love more. The only thing for me is to go deeper into revealing more and more of this Power of Life and Love within me and to see it in everyone else. I really do not know what else to do.

Love and Aloha,

Rev. Rita