Listen To Your Life with Josh Reeves

[00:00:01] This is Josh Reeves and you're listening to the Mile Hi Church Podcast, Kudos To You for

[00:00:05] focusing on your spiritual growth, speaking a spiritual growth have you had your moment

[00:00:09] of awe today.

[00:00:11] Dacker Kelpner wrote a great book called awe and it's all about how awe can heal us,

[00:00:16] uplift us and keep us dialed in.

[00:00:19] He's going to be at Mile Hi Church on November 1st, talking about it, you can join us in

[00:00:23] person, you can join us online, it's going to be fantastic.

[00:00:26] Check out MileHi Church.org

[00:00:31] There's a great minister who serves as an unsuspecting model for ministry to me.

[00:00:40] His name is Frederick Beekner, he died in 2022 and he was primarily a writer and novelist

[00:00:49] but he could give a hell of a sermon as well.

[00:00:52] And what I liked about him is he had a humble kind of authority, the kind of spiritual

[00:00:58] authority that only comes through deep humility and he demonstrated as well not so much

[00:01:04] of vulnerability as a woundedness.

[00:01:09] He had a woundedness about him, most especially due to his father committing suicide when

[00:01:15] he was a child and especially in his adult life, a daughter who almost died of anorexial.

[00:01:22] And Beekner somewhat famously once shared an encapsulation of his entire ministry.

[00:01:30] He said, if I have to put it in a few words that would go like this, listen to your life.

[00:01:40] See it for the fabulous mystery that it is.

[00:01:47] In the poor boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and the gladness.

[00:01:55] Touch, taste.

[00:01:57] Smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all

[00:02:04] moments are key moments and life itself is grace.

[00:02:12] It's a Tuesday morning and I wake up feeling good the night before on Monday.

[00:02:19] I thought, just as the most peaceful you felt in a long time.

[00:02:24] And then I get a text message from my sister.

[00:02:28] Dad is in the ICU.

[00:02:31] He has a case of sepsis but he's on an IV.

[00:02:37] He's conscious.

[00:02:38] He's okay.

[00:02:40] Life was speaking to me in that moment and all I wanted to hear was he's okay.

[00:02:46] So I grabbed that, held on to it and went to work because that's what I do.

[00:02:52] And at about 3 p.m., the phone rang.

[00:02:56] Dad has gone into cardiac arrest.

[00:02:58] He was actually flatlined for 12 minutes and they were able to bring him back.

[00:03:04] But now he's incubated.

[00:03:05] He's on life support.

[00:03:08] I think most of us would agree that life speaks to us all the time.

[00:03:13] The question I have to ask myself is why do I so infrequently listen?

[00:03:19] Life is talking to me all the time.

[00:03:23] Why don't I listen more intently?

[00:03:27] Is it because I like to live in an illusion that I'm right?

[00:03:30] A kind of tunnel vision.

[00:03:33] Is it a defense?

[00:03:36] Because if I truly listened,

[00:03:40] I might have to change.

[00:03:42] Or I could just break down.

[00:03:47] I take this news about Dad.

[00:03:49] I work for another hour.

[00:03:51] Do some errands, get some dinner, sit down with my wife and daughter in eat.

[00:03:56] And finally I've heard something.

[00:03:58] Because I get up, I pack a bag and I'm going to make the 14 hour drive overnight to California

[00:04:02] to the hospital to see Dad.

[00:04:07] I've got my iPhone with me and I know I'm going to be able to play songs from A to Z.

[00:04:14] Dad gave me a gift.

[00:04:15] It's a hard drive with his whole music collection.

[00:04:17] So I always put a few of those songs on there.

[00:04:19] And I'm on G.

[00:04:21] It's really late at night and I'm on my way out of the Rocky Mountains.

[00:04:26] And there's a song that comes on in G.

[00:04:29] It's a song that John Lennon recorded just before his death.

[00:04:33] It's a song called Grow Old With Me.

[00:06:01] God bless our Lord.

[00:06:08] God bless our Lord.

[00:06:15] Spending our Lord together together.

[00:06:27] World without Him without Him.

[00:06:40] Dad is going to die.

[00:06:42] If not today or tomorrow, then sometime.

[00:06:46] Mom's going to have to go to.

[00:06:48] I'm going to die as well.

[00:06:51] So is everyone I know.

[00:06:54] But perhaps the dumbest sentence in the human language is till death to us part.

[00:07:03] Love is all that remains.

[00:07:06] In the end, it's all that really exists.

[00:07:09] What is all this living and dying and partnering about other than to give birth to a love that is eternal.

[00:07:20] God bless our love.

[00:07:23] God bless our love.

[00:07:26] Listen to your life.

[00:07:28] See it for the fabulous mystery it is.

[00:07:32] In the pain and the boredom, as much as in the gladness and excitement.

[00:07:39] Touch smell, taste your way to the holy and hidden heart of it.

[00:07:44] Because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments.

[00:07:48] And life itself is grace.

[00:07:52] To a couple hours later, I'm in Utah.

[00:07:57] And it's so dark that all I can see is the light from the headlights and I pass the little sign,

[00:08:02] warning about drowsy drivers and it resonates.

[00:08:05] It speaks just to me.

[00:08:08] And I catch out of the corner of my eye, a little bunny rabbit.

[00:08:13] Don't do it.

[00:08:13] Don't do it.

[00:08:20] Do I stop?

[00:08:22] Do I turn around?

[00:08:24] Life is so cruel.

[00:08:27] Things can go wrong, just like that.

[00:08:35] Life is speaking to us all at the time.

[00:08:39] Let's listen to a right now shall we?

[00:08:45] Sir moment in your morning, just today, that spoke to you.

[00:08:50] An image, a song, a breakfast, a conversation.

[00:08:57] Life is talking to us all of the time if we'll listen.

[00:09:03] And we're often being competed for with all the voices going on in our head.

[00:09:09] And yet we know there is one that is true, that brings us closer to who we are and what our lives are all about.

[00:09:21] If we were to ask Frederick, how to best listen to our lives, he began by saying,

[00:09:25] listen to the mediocre things.

[00:09:30] Listen to the seemingly mundane.

[00:09:33] He shares using God instead of life, which for us and our faith are interchangeable.

[00:09:40] He shares there's no chance thing through which God cannot speak.

[00:09:44] Even the walk from the house to the garage that you've walked 10,000 times before.

[00:09:48] Even the moments when you cannot believe there's a God who speaks it all anywhere.

[00:09:52] He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flashing blood of ourselves and of our own,

[00:10:00] foot sore and sacred journeys.

[00:10:05] Listen to your breakfast cereal.

[00:10:10] Listen to the sky when you look up at it when you're stuck at a red light.

[00:10:16] The next time you pick up your phone, use it as a reminder to put it down.

[00:10:23] Listen, there's so much depth, warmth, brilliance, available to us.

[00:10:31] If we can get over ourselves and those voices that distract us from the now

[00:10:36] and it will bring us more deeply into who we are.

[00:10:41] An important thing to understand about the language of life is that it's very much show not tell.

[00:10:47] You may get a some words thrown out here, but for the most part you're going to get finn yet some experience that are well,

[00:10:55] springs of meaning that we can draw upon forever.

[00:11:00] And sometimes it's wisest to just listen to them for a while.

[00:11:04] Henry James, the great novelist, gave some advice to writers.

[00:11:10] He said, let nothing be lost on you.

[00:11:14] I would give that same counsel for all of us seeking to live whole lives.

[00:11:19] Let nothing be lost on you.

[00:11:26] My wife and daughter and I, we go out to dinner, El Tapeteo.

[00:11:32] We can talk about El Tapeteo after service.

[00:11:34] I do want to.

[00:11:37] The hostess puts a kid's menu on one side of the table and two adult menus on one side.

[00:11:43] And I asked my daughter where she wants to sit.

[00:11:46] And she says she wants to sit next to her daddy.

[00:11:49] And she does for a little while and then she wants to sit next to mommy.

[00:11:53] And she does, but mommy says you know sometimes children shouldn't always be able to choose where they sit.

[00:12:00] And I can tell she's a little upset.

[00:12:03] Listen to your wife.

[00:12:05] See her for the fathomless mystery that she is.

[00:12:12] And we get home and I inquire further.

[00:12:17] When I had come home earlier that evening, I had even looked at my wife.

[00:12:23] I'd gone straight to my daughter to give her a hug.

[00:12:27] You never put me first.

[00:12:30] So is the church?

[00:12:33] So is the random person that calls or kids whatever it is?

[00:12:37] We're married.

[00:12:39] I'm your wife.

[00:12:40] You never put me first.

[00:12:44] Listening is the foundation of healing.

[00:12:52] And when we're called out in life, it's sometimes better not to defend ourselves but to listen.

[00:13:00] Not to try to explain our good intentions but to listen.

[00:13:05] Not to argue but to listen.

[00:13:09] And in listening, magically somehow we don't even have to do another thing.

[00:13:16] The healing can begin.

[00:13:19] See there's no such thing as a bad listener.

[00:13:22] No such thing as a bad listener.

[00:13:24] There are only people who choose to listen to the wrong, non-relevant items.

[00:13:33] But when we're willing to listen to our lives even when it's hard, even when it punches us in the gut.

[00:13:38] It has so much valuable information for us.

[00:13:43] The most important lesson in all of my ministry I learned in February of 2011, I was at the

[00:13:49] Seal Beach Center for Spiritual Living and we had a matriarch of the church many of them.

[00:13:53] But this particular woman her name is Frita Wright.

[00:13:56] She's a wonderful practitioner there and we were having our annual meeting where we select new members for our board of trustees.

[00:14:03] She had someone she wanted to nominate to be on the board and didn't realize that about two years before the board had rewritten the bylaws so that you had to go through a selection committee.

[00:14:14] You couldn't make a nomination from the floor and she was furious.

[00:14:18] And so the meeting ends and we sit down and she bald me out for about an hour.

[00:14:23] There was yelling and bald, there were tears involved.

[00:14:27] All based on genuine distrust for ministers.

[00:14:31] The chief experience several times over.

[00:14:35] The conversation ended and Frita laughed and I worried all that week, wondering what my next ministry was going to be.

[00:14:44] And the question is how do I fix this?

[00:14:47] What can I do? How can I make this better?

[00:14:49] I'm wondering how to problem solve when a card came that Thursday afternoon.

[00:14:55] It was from Frita and I opened the card and it only said three words.

[00:15:00] Thanks for listening.

[00:15:02] Thanks for listening.

[00:15:05] Frita and I never had another conflict again.

[00:15:09] Listen to your life.

[00:15:11] See it for the fabulous mystery it is.

[00:15:14] In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness.

[00:15:19] Touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it.

[00:15:23] Because in the last analysis, all moments or key moments in life itself is grace.

[00:15:31] Your life may never tell you the whole truth but it will never lie to you.

[00:15:38] Any moment, any scenario, carries our wholeness in it if we can decipher and listen and embody what it teaches us.

[00:15:49] For to listen to life is to learn to find your own voice.

[00:15:57] It's to learn to find the courage and the vulnerability to speak that voice.

[00:16:03] It's to become that which you really are.

[00:16:07] To learn to listen to life is to learn to find your own voice.

[00:16:11] It's to learn to cultivate the courage and the vulnerability to share that voice.

[00:16:15] It's to become who you are.

[00:16:18] That's how important that listening is.

[00:16:22] Another piece of advice that Big Miracles gives to us, pay attention to your moments of unexpected tears.

[00:16:32] Pay attention to those moments of unexpected tears.

[00:16:36] You remember your last moment of unexpected tears?

[00:16:39] I was watching Coco with Nancy June, the Disney movie.

[00:16:46] It could be a moment of quiet before you go to bed or even when you wake up in the morning.

[00:16:52] A song that came on the radio.

[00:16:56] Sometime looking up at the sky when you're waiting at that red light,

[00:17:00] but there's something about those moments of unexpected tears that grab us.

[00:17:04] They call us to listen.

[00:17:07] Something important is taking place.

[00:17:11] Beekner shares have you ever wept at anything during the past year?

[00:17:14] Has your heartbeat faster at the side of a young beauty?

[00:17:17] Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday you're going to die?

[00:17:21] More often than not, do you really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?

[00:17:27] Is there anybody you know in whose place if one you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself?

[00:17:33] If you're answered to all or most of these questions as no, the chances are that you're dead.

[00:17:44] My dad had been on life support for a little over two weeks.

[00:17:49] And I had to take it to fly out to see him on Monday, but on this particular Friday evening I get to be on a balcony in beautiful veil.

[00:17:57] Just a couple hours from where my dad spent his favorite times of his young life in the universe to Colorado.

[00:18:05] And I'm hoping to say goodbye to Dad again or hello.

[00:18:09] He's got a respirator and there's that hope when they pull it that he still might be able to breathe on his own and find his way to recovery.

[00:18:17] But the time has come that day where the doctors want to remove the breathing tube and give them a truck away out of me,

[00:18:22] where they put the hole in the throat and put the feeding tube and he'd win it if wanted that.

[00:18:27] So I did want him to have to wait for me.

[00:18:29] And so they pulled the respirator and Dad was gone in three minutes.

[00:18:34] His body was just not going to contain his spirit any longer.

[00:18:42] And I did all I could do in that moment just to listen.

[00:18:47] To listen to the flow of the creek, to listen to the darkness of space around me,

[00:18:54] to listen to the shining of the stars, to listen to the sobbing that turns on and off without any self control.

[00:19:04] Just to listen.

[00:19:06] And sometimes life asks us questions in the question I was faced with that is where's your dad now?

[00:19:14] What's going on with his spirit or his soul?

[00:19:16] And I can't tell you what I think in this moment, but in that moment it was clear to me that there was no life after death and the sense of for me his soul.

[00:19:27] You know going on into greater dimensions of being this is just for in that moment.

[00:19:31] Because I could hear my Dad in nature.

[00:19:35] I could hear him in that flow of the river.

[00:19:38] I could hear him in that shining of the stars.

[00:19:40] I could hear him in the black pits of space that surrounded me in those moments.

[00:19:44] I could hear him in the sobbing of the tears.

[00:19:48] My Dad was a beautiful character, no principle of nature.

[00:19:54] And he had returned into that aspect of nature.

[00:19:58] And I got the insight in that moment that nature's filled with sacred memory.

[00:20:03] That it feels primordial because perhaps it remembers us.

[00:20:07] The river remembers who stepped into it.

[00:20:10] The star remembers who looked up at it.

[00:20:13] The night sky embraces all in their emptiness and in their longings.

[00:20:19] And there I found a sense of connection with my father, a wish for him that he could live in sacred memory.

[00:20:28] The recognition that in this human lifetime memories are passing and fading.

[00:20:33] And yet, on the soul's time, they're eternal.

[00:20:38] They last forever with layers and layers of meaning.

[00:20:43] We can experience and learn from again and again.

[00:20:47] And so I wish my father the experience of a moment of joy with his mother.

[00:20:52] The experience of delight in holding one of his own children.

[00:20:56] The depth of a moment stuck at a red light looking up at the sky.

[00:21:05] Emerson said of those that we lose in our lives,

[00:21:09] that they become guides, principles, guiding stars for us to follow.

[00:21:16] He shares the depth of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation.

[00:21:21] Somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or a genius for commonly operates revolutions in our way of life.

[00:21:29] Terminate to knee-pock of infancy or of youth, which is waiting to be closed.

[00:21:35] Brakes up a wanted occupation or a household or style of living and allows the formation of a new one more friendly to the growth of character.

[00:21:48] Let us, as we move into prayer, do what is best which is to listen.

[00:21:57] Psychnowledge our practitioner prayer partners who are variable for prayer to join me.

[00:22:02] Let us indeed listen to our lives.

[00:22:06] See them for the fabulous mysteries that they are in the pain and the boredom no less than an exciting and gladness.

[00:22:13] Taste, smell, sea are way into the holy and hidden heart of it.

[00:22:20] Because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments in life itself is grace.

[00:22:28] Divine spirit, I listen for your good in my life.

[00:22:35] Even in moments that don't feel so good, I know you're greatness, your greatness, your goodness is right there.

[00:22:43] God, I listen for your peace in my life.

[00:22:47] In moments of gladness or moments of chaos, I still feel your stillness.

[00:22:55] God, I listen for your silence in my life.

[00:23:03] Whether in a moment of quiet or in the loud and overwhelming,

[00:23:07] I know the thread of your stillness is there.

[00:23:12] And God, I listen for your love in my life.

[00:23:18] I hear it in my relationships, in my memories.

[00:23:24] In my everyday interactions and in my solitude, God bless our love.

[00:23:31] God bless our love.

[00:23:33] And so it is.

[00:23:35] Thanks for listening to the Mile High Church podcast.

[00:23:38] This podcast is made possible by the generous contributions from listeners like you.

[00:23:43] To make a donation, please visit Milehigh Church.org.