Living in The Vision

By Michael Bernard Beckwith

Personal story:  When I caught the vision of Agape, it was long before its commencement 31 years ago!  It took several years, until 1986, for me to drop my long-held resistance to starting a spiritual community.  After all, I reasoned, I was running a prayer ministry, I was a faculty member at the Holmes Institute School of Ministry, and, I was the father of two young children.  My surface mind argued that I had enough on my plate!

So I tried ignoring that the next step in my life purpose was to be the founder of a spiritual community, although Spirit was continuously whispering in my inner ear that unless I followed this mandate, there would be no purpose for me to remain on the planet.  Now of course this wasn’t transmitted to me as a punishment for resisting, it was simply an impersonal message about fulfilling my karmic purpose.

Eventually, as I surrendered to the vision I was given, the clinging ego let go of its resistance and some of the structures in my life started to deteriorate. For example, at that time I was going to the chiropractor to treat my neck which would not properly rotate to the right.  When I finally surrendered to my vision, the rotation issue suddenly healed and has never returned.  What I came to realize, through my own resistance, is that our pain pushes us until our vision pulls us.

There have been many other visions that followed which recently came back to me as I attended dedications of Agape Affiliate Spiritual Centers, one of which was last weekend at the Agape Bay Area Center for Awakened Living.

Certainly I am not in any way an exception, for each of us has come to this planet with Spirit’s vision for our life implanted within us, just awaiting for us to discover and implement it. Every individual has the life purpose to reveal and reflect the face of Divinity as only he or she can in their own unique way.  Each of us has incarnated with dreams and visions which, when honored and followed, will break us free from the status quo, from living a life of mediocrity and allow us to forge new paths while we are in Earth School.  No one is bereft of dreams and visions, even though they may be too caught up in and distracted by life to discover the gifts, talents and skills they have come on the planet to deliver.

The Practice:

Today, as you move through your day, live in a state of conscious inquiry by learning to ask empowering questions rather than disempower questions. Make this a practice that leads to a way of life and watch how your life unfolds to support your life’s purpose.

Disempowering questions are, for example: Why me? What’s wrong with me? Who’s to blame?

Conscious questioning:  What good is here that I do not see?  What is trying to emerge in my life right now?  What is the next step I must take to develop my gifts and talents and deliver them in the world?

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