Midweek Faith Lift
February 25, 2026
“Being Fully Alive”
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
February 17, 2026
If you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn’t say: “Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud.” Resignation is not surrender. You don’t need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the “isness” of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the mud.
- Eckart Tolle, The Power of Now
God is on your side. God has a stake in you. God is not someone to reach for, but a Presence to accept. Instead of dwelling on how difficult things are for you, turn often to the center of your being and relax in the assurance that you are God's living enterprise and that your good fortune is secure because it is God's good pleasure to give it to you.”
- Eric Butterworth, Spiritual Economics
"Seize the moment. Remember all those people on the Titanic who
waved off the dessert cart." - Erma Bombeck
And to celebrate the, at times, ridiculous joy of our humanness, this coming Thursday, February 26 is also “National Tongue Twister Day!” Tongue twisters came into use in 1813, thanks to John Harris’s book Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation, which featured a tongue twister for every letter of the alphabet.
So, now, let's master our words and let our voices rise up! We're going to do a couple of call-and-response tongue twisters. Ready? Repeat after me: “Red leather, yellow leather.” Good! Now, aluminum, linoleum. Now,
She sells seashells by the seashore. If your tongue trips, you’re doing it right.
Now this one: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
And, one more, everyone: "A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk, but the stump thunk the skunk stunk." You are good!!
Affirmative Prayer for Today: Infinite Spirit of Love, it is in the energy of love that I live, move and have my being. In that energy, I am fully alive and I claim all that life offers me as I fully live into my divinity. Amen.
Last Sunday we explored the energy of acceptance as the key to love and how difficult it is to fully accept our human selves. The key is to realize both the sacredness of our humanity and the wonder of our divinity. That is the essence of our true spiritual journey, but frequently we stay stuck in the mud. We don’t especially like the mud, but it is the mud that holds the key to our freedom, to our growth. As Rosemergy says in The Sacred Human:
When we are non-accepting of our human selves, we erect a barrier to the divine love that is perpetually showered upon us. We are cut off from the treasures that lie within and although we may believe our nature to be spiritual, we do not consistently express it. P. 49
Welcome to the mud! Our human existence is a muddy business even as we want to avoid the experience of being in it, stepping in it, even seeing it. The truth is, the mud of our humanity is the gateway through which the divine may enter and do its work if we will allow it.
Ahh, yes, the mud settles and we can see more clearly, and we learn how we got stuck and that perhaps we have something to do with it! Imagine that! Last week was a journey into the silence and how it reveals the internal ticking of our consciousness that shows us our growth edges, what we don’t want to see. We can clearly hear our “stinkin thinkin” and see how it dead ends us. When the mud settles, we can see our hurts, our grievances, our emotional pain and we feel into all that is there. That is when the holy water of tears usually happens, that is when grief is expressed, that is when resentments are released. That is when it helps to have a caring friend, a 12-step group, a spiritual director and sometimes a therapist, to help mine the depths of the emotional treasures that are buried in your mud.
This is not easy work and we would just as soon avoid it, but it is the way out of the mud, and frankly, it is the only way! What we may have buried never stays buried. It leaks out at the most inopportune times! When we mine the depth of our souls, we experience our humanity or our divinity, both, and that is when spiritual growth happens, in that now moment. We feel the pain, we experience the heartbreak, the heartache, and then we allow Spirit to do its perfect healing work in us. Each issue that is healed brings us more fully alive and out of the mud! Rosemergy offers us words of caution on p. 51 of The Sacred Human: “As we begin to search for our souls’ treasures, we are not to over analyze what we find.”
Why is that? I had to think about that one for a bit and what I realized is that as soon as I analyze things, I over analyze them for sure. I get out of my heart and into my head again, into the energy of wanting to “fix” or control things so that this human “mistake” does not happen again! As if my human understanding could stop me, right! I have proved again and again that just understanding how many calories are in an ice cream sundae or fettucine alfredo with wine and good bread has never stopped me before….you get the picture. Ah, welcome to the mud!
Part of my muddy stinkin thinkin has been that I have to be in control. Or if I don’t control everything, I might get hurt again. Well, my human experience has taught me to pause, reflect, and then pray. When I do that, I realize that I have in fact, found my way free from abusive relationships and I have healed the hurts of those experiences. And I have been hurt again, because I am a work in progress and so are the people I love. That is just how we are, and we love one another in spite of it, or perhaps because of it. I love you most when I am able to be my authentic, real human self when I am with you. I love you most when you do the same! It is much harder when either one of us pretends it doesn’t hurt or that it doesn’t matter.
We do heal, we do grow, and as Butterworth assured us, we are God’s living enterprise and God is always with us, even in the midst of suffering, even in the deepest mud. The hardest part sometimes, is that we don’t recognize it as mud or realize what part of it is our mud and not the other person’s mud! It is just mud, as Eckhart Tolle says, we accept the “isness” of the moment and allow it to be, even when we are uncomfortable. When we don’t try to label it as wrong or bad, we can just be with all of what is and cultivate curiosity about it. “I wonder what this is really all about?” is a much more fruitful question than “Just whose fault is this?” There is much in the first question that turns the mud into compost for sure.
It is frequently really awkward to just allow yourself or another to feel what you feel in the moment and be present to it. We resist feeling it because it is so awkward, and yet, if we are going to live from the inside out, we need to be willing to live in the awkward moments with as much honesty and integrity as we can muster. We don’t expect anyone else to rescue us, we just honestly state what is there….I am feeling so awkward and uncomfortable and be willing to get curious about it. Clarity will come as the light of grace. Prayer in those moments always helps! I can’t, God can, I will let God shine the light of love on this now moment.
Every flower was first a seed and seeds are generally not all that pretty. They have to spend some time in the mud in order to grow and bloom into all they can be. And here’s the rub, the bloom fades into the next seed or growth opportunity, which also is how we become more fully alive. Our humanness is the husk around the seed and the seed is our divinity that comes fully alive in spiritual growth. It is the sunshine of acceptance that warms the soul and calls the seed to grow.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. - Matthew 6:34
We began with tongue twisters that show us how quickly the mind stumbles when it rushes—and how much joy appears when we slow down, say our word, and even laugh together. And, even when our words stumble, they still carry power—so imagine what happens when we speak with intention.
So may our spiritual tongue twister be:
Words wisely woven within work wonders.
And so we grow…..
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb