Willingness

lf I have to know today is that I'm willing to have my life be different.

"Willingness" is the key to my freedom.

When I'm open minded, when I'm ready to listen to ideas and suggestions, I'm already changing my life for the better.

Time to Break Free by Judith R. Smith

 

Open Heart

As one can see when the eyes are open,

so one can understand when the heart is open.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

The Bowl of Saki

Willingness

I was told that I must want sobriety for my own sake, and I am convinced this is true.

There may be many reasons that bring one to AA for the first time, but the lasting one must be to want sobriety and the AA way of living for oneself.

Alcoholics Anonymous  pp. 354-55

 

The express elevator to sobriety doesn't work 

-- please use the Steps.

 

H O W = Honesty, Open-mindedness, Willingness.

 

 

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A Stormy World

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.
Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.

-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Distressing Disguise

A dear friend once confided to me that she believed that, if Christ were to show up at her door, she would probably not let him in.
Would she be ready, she wondered, to have him enter her life, to wreck her prefect planning, to rearrange her priorities?
Jesus tell us "that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him but did whatever they pleased. So will the Son of Man suffer at their hands."
This challenge to "recognize" Jesus is clearly much more than seeing him or even acknowledging where he came from.
Rather, we need to see him, as Mother Teresa so often said, "in distressing disguise" -- in the face of a spouse, a parent, a child.
Jesus Christ is present here and now as the person who annoys me and disturbs me, who disrupts my plans and disappoints my expectations.
To be kind to him I cannot simply stand on niceties.
I have to change.
Ihave to say things that don't seem to come naturally, kind things.
I have to give something I don't seem to have to give.
I have to open the door to my heart.
During Advent each of us ought to ask for this grace:

to see that it is Christ knocking at
the door of our hearts and to let him in!

-- Lisa Lickona

Loving Father, give me the freedom to change so as to
be completely open to the presence of your Son in my life

Willingness

What have I been given today?
Am I willing to reach out and grasp it?

An Open Heart

As one can see when the eyes are open,
so one can understand when the heart is open.

-- Hazrat Inayat Khan
The Bowl of Saki

Willingness

If faith without works is dead;
then willingness without action is fantasy.