It is coming up on the one year anniversary of the first day God spoke to me. The person I was then feels like a stranger to present-day me, the one busy putting the finishing touches on a book proposal that I am submitting to my agent based on what I’ve received over the past year. (This is the main reason why my posts have been less than daily lately, Simpsons marathon notwithstanding.)
The other day I began meditating on a possible title, when one word jumped into my consciousness: Hineni.
“Hineni” is Hebrew for “here I am.” It is the title of a traditional prayer recited in synagogue during the Jewish High Holidays, including Yom Kippur, the day I first heard from God last year. The “hineni” prayer is chanted by the cantor; its message and purpose is so that God will find him worthy of praying on behalf of the congregation, roughly that God will not hold the cantor’s sins or imperfections against everyone else as the congregation is judged for the year ahead. The cantor is saying in effect, “here I am,” standing before God, for the community.
The first usage of the word “hineni” is in Genesis 22:1. “Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, “Abraham,” and he answered, “here I am.” Biblical commentators say that “here I am” is an imperfect English translation of “hineni”; the word indicates readiness, alertness, attentiveness, and responsiveness to instructions.
This imperfect phrase, “Here I Am,” is the closest I can think of to encapsulate the feeling I had then and now, a feeling of readiness to be of service, to live my life on purpose for a calling, the first step of which was starting Daily Possible.
What does it mean to be ready? To be attentive and alert? It means living with a sense of expectancy that all is possible, that God is everywhere. That through a responsiveness to instructions, not so much like following a set of rules, but by responding to your calling, your destiny, your life purpose.
This is what God asks each of us to declare: Here I am, ready to do my best. Here I am, ready to make a positive impact on the planet.. Here I am, ready to share my gifts and love.
God, the Great I Am, is saying much the same thing to us. Here is God — I Am — ready to support us. God, the Great I Am, ready to love us, ready to forgive us, ready to move mountains and birth new beginnings on our behalf.
God created us all and is inside us all. So here we are, all of us together. Are you ready?
My hope is that you share this same enthusiasm for the possibilities emerging in your own life.
In times when doubt and fear creep in to my consciousness, one way to get back in touch with my feeling of readiness is to imagine playing the game “Hide and Seek.” I count to ten, and say “Ready or not, here I come.”
In this imaginary version of the game, the goal is not to seek out who is hidden, but to open up to the awareness that God is everywhere, hiding in plain sight. To challenge myself to see possibility everywhere, love everywhere, joy everywhere, abundance everywhere.
And God plays along. Try it. You may become aware that it is us hiding from God in plain sight when we fill our days with fear, doubt, overwhelm and distractions, whether conscious of it or not. God meanwhile sees us everywhere, searching for an opening into our hearts to communicate through us.
Ready or not, here God comes.
#dailypossible affirmation: I am ready for more love than I’ve ever imagined that is entering my life right now. I am ready for more abundance than I’ve ever conceived. I am ready for the miracles that are taking place in my life right now. Here I am, fully alive and ready to be found. And So It Is.
Photo: Greg Westfall, Flickr.com