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I looked back to the beginning of my spiritual practice recently and realized it was a single idea that got me started out of a quagmire of depression and defeat. Just one little idea! Who doesn’t have one spiritual truth that has worked for them at some point in their life? If that is all you’ve got, it is the rope you need to climb out of your darkness. Do not doubt its power. I think more people do not pursue a spiritual practice is because they think they must figure it all out before they start. What a daunting task that would be! Every denomination and every sect has their complicated theological construct. If you’re like me, there’s always a lot of stuff in there that your heart or mind cannot accept. Once I purposed to join a church and went through “orientation.” When I took their manual of doctrines home and studied them, I backed out. There were things that my mind could not accept and some my heart could not accept. I knew I did not want to be a part of a church that taught things my heart and mind could not accept. Contrast that with the day one little truth came to me as I sat in a one-room apartment broke financially and dangerously depressed. In one situation I am overloaded with a wheelbarrow load of pre-baked, packaged beliefs a church was asking me to accept – beliefs that immobilize me. In the other situation I took hold of one spiritual truth and start climbing out of despair. Drop from your mind any idea that spiritual truth is a big tome you must memorize and embrace. That attitude will do nothing to help you. It will freeze you right where you are and set your soul in concrete. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” My interpretation of that is that any truth you know will set you free from something. Each truth you accept and demonstrate in your life will set you free and we are all free to the extent that we come to know truths. Someone described a theologian as “a person who will spend years trying to figure how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” I am not that hard on them but I say with inner certainly that the last person you want to talk to if you are contemplating a spiritual practice is a theologian. After you have enough truths working in your life to not be shaken up by complexity, you might want to talk to one for the mental exercise it would afford. Jesus was a master at simplification as we see in his answer to a lawyer’s question one day. The lawyer asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest of all. In addition to knowing about the Ten Commandments, Jesus knew the Scribes of Jesus’ time wrote down all the beliefs and rules of religious practice cranked out by the Pharisees and Sadducees. They actually wore little bracelets with tiny boxes stuffed with these rules, regulations and beliefs. Yet Jesus shook it right down to the essentials and said, “Love God … and love your neighbor.” That’s not all he said. He added, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The single truth that set my life on a positive course was a question that came to me at the peak of my discouragement. That question was, “Have there ever been times when God was real to you?” I knew there had been. It followed that if God had ever been real to me, God could be real to me again. If you have no personal truth to start a new life with, you can try that one.
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