How Do You Fill Your Soul?

"There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready be filled. You feel it, don't you?"

Rumi

I love quotes that are so beautiful it makes my heart swoon. But I am also a pragmatic person, and old. Really old. So I've been on the losing end of a sweet talker a time or two in my life, so I happen to believe swooning is over-rated. I can cause head injuries at my age.

I believe Rumi, and on those days - all 12 of them in my life - when I can feel my soul - it does long to be filled. But how does that happen? How do we fill our soul?

That's what we're going to talk about for awhile...but before we go there, breathe. Remember Rumi's words and know that you are inherently worthy because you are absolutely made in the image of God.

Virtue Sets the Coordinates

I am not going to try to find the perfect scripture for what I am about to say because I believe it would require cutting and pasting the entire bible. So allow me to summarize. You carry within you the capacity for virtuosity. Now, I know, this word is rarely used to describe a person but hang with me. Technically, this word means "great skill in music oranother artistic pursuit" (Oxford Languages).

And that is exactly what I intend to convey about you and all humans. When we bear the image of God, it is not a replica, it's a tiny piece. You are not THE God or even A God, but you bear his image by holding within your spirit a virtue that is attributable to God. You arrived with it and I assume we take it back with us when we return to our heavenly home.

This virtue is what needs to be mirrored to us and rarely is. This virtue, once identified, sets the coordinates for the rest of our work as long as we live. This virtue, when combined with the virtues carried in the bodies of all the other humans on earth will change the world.

It will be virtue that will bring heaven to earth.

And we will have to release our habitual ways of being in the world to allow it to rise up and take hold of your choices.

If you do not know what your virtue is, do not give up the hunt. For you life will not longer be about what you lack, get wrong, or have been hurt by. Your life will be one big adventure of ridding yourself of any of the ties that bind you to your small way of seeing yourself, your false beliefs and limited thoughts, your mis-guided albeit sincere emotions and your unproductive way of doing things.

Keep looking. You are in there. You are worth the fight.