Not My Will: Learning to Walk in Spirit

This morning, I went for a walk and found a quiet place to sit, meditate and pray. I asked Spirit to come close to me and help me walk the path I am here to walk. I asked for help using the gifts I came here to use, and as soon as I said that, another thought rose up in me almost immediately: 'But I don’t want to do this from my ego.'  I don’t want my spiritual gifts to ever become about being seen as special or powerful. I don’t want to perform, prove, impress, or make my work about being right. I want to be sincere. I want to be real and authentic. More than anything, I want whatever I bring into this world to come through love.

As I sat there thinking about the difference between ego and Spirit, I suddenly thought about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Knowing what was ahead of him, Jesus prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Clearly, his human self did not want to go to the cross. He knew the suffering that was coming, and yet I believe another part of him understood that this was one of the experiences he had come to Earth to face.

I believe that before we come here, we have a hand in creating the experiences our soul wants to encounter during our human life. From that perspective, I see Jesus as being in deep communion with his higher self in that moment. His humanity was saying, I don't want to experience this, while something deeper within him understood that what was coming was also aligned with the path he had chosen before incarnating as a human.

I believe we each participate in creating our timelines and certain experiences before we incarnate, and sometimes we encounter things during our lives that feel incredibly difficult from our human perspective. We may ask, Why is this happening to me? Why would I ever choose this? Yet perhaps there is another part of us, our higher self, that understands the experience from a much broader perspective. What feels like an interruption, tragedy, or detour to the human self may also become a profound moment of reflection, awakening, remembering, or transformation.

In some ways, I believe this is what I have recently experienced through my mountain biking accident. For a short period of time, I lost access to my memory and even my ability to fully understand what was happening around me. Now, as I continue recovering from the concussion, I've had more quiet and stillness than I ever would have chosen for myself. My human self certainly wouldn't have chosen the fear, pain, uncertainty, or limitations that came with this experience. But as I sit in the stillness it has created, I can't help but wonder whether some deeper part of me knew there was something here that I needed to experience.

Maybe that is part of surrender too. It doesn't mean we have to enjoy the difficult things that happen to us or pretend they don't hurt. It means allowing ourselves to ask whether there might be something our Spirit understands about the path that our human mind cannot yet see.

Something about those words landed differently for me this morning. I realized in that moment, Jesus was acknowledging both his humanity and his divinity. His human self had desires, fears, and a will of its own, while the Spirit within him was connected to something greater. Rather than denying his humanity, he acknowledged what he wanted and then consciously surrendered it to the deeper divine wisdom within him: “Not my will, but yours be done.” I believe he was acknowledging what his higher self had known all along. This will be hard, but it has purpose. 

When I use the word ego, I’m not talking only about arrogance or thinking highly of yourself. I’m talking about the human ego, the part of us that wants control, approval, safety, certainty, recognition, and relief from discomfort. If Jesus truly walked this Earth as a human being, then he experienced the human condition too. He became tired. He was hungry. He grieved. He felt anger. He experienced temptation. He knew fear and suffering. He even asked that the cup before him be taken away.

Maybe part of his mastery wasn’t that he never experienced ego, fear, or human desire. Maybe it was that he continually returned to Spirit when those things arose. I imagine that, in fully experiencing his humanity, he also understood the deeply human desire to be known, seen, accepted, and loved, the same longing that exists within all of us. There is nothing inherently wrong with those desires, but when we become consumed by them, the ego can become so loud that it begins to drown out the quieter voice of Spirit. Perhaps Jesus was showing us how to acknowledge our humanity without allowing it to become the voice that leads us.

Before beginning his ministry, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness confronting temptation and the pull of the human self. The biblical text we have today tells us that Satan was the one who tempted Jesus, but I have come to believe that somewhere through the translation and human interpretation of these ancient teachings, the original meaning may have been misunderstood or changed. I don't believe Jesus was describing an external evil spirit or Satan tempting him. I believe he was experiencing the internal pull of his own human ego, the same struggle between ego and Spirit that every human being experiences. 

When I look at the temptations themselves, they feel deeply human to me. They represent desires for comfort, power, recognition, control, and certainty. The things our human selves naturally reach for when we are afraid, uncomfortable, or seeking validation. In this way, I see the wilderness as Jesus coming face-to-face with his own humanity and learning to recognize which voice he would allow to guide him.

Perhaps that is also why we see Jesus continually returning to prayer and solitude throughout his ministry. He repeatedly withdrew from the crowds to reconnect with God and the Spirit within him. Before choosing his disciples, he spent the night in prayer. And before facing one of the most difficult moments of his life, he once again returned to surrender. Rather than allowing fear, ego, or human desire to determine his path, he became still enough to hear and follow the deeper wisdom within.

"Not my will, but yours be done."

I found myself in this same place this morning. I sat there saying, I would love to serve in the way I am here to serve, but I don't want to do it through the desire to be seen as important. I don't want my gifts to create the illusion that I am somehow above anyone else. I want to use them to reflect people back to their own truth and help them remember what already exists within them.

I want people to understand that there is no above or below here. There is no human who inherently holds more of God than another. There is unity, and there is love, and perhaps these are the things we should be seeking above everything else. We all come from the same Source, and when we begin to understand that, the ego-driven belief that one person is somehow greater, more spiritual, or more worthy than another begins to fall away.

This gives an entirely different depth to Jesus' teaching to "love your neighbor as yourself." Our neighbor is, in a very real spiritual sense, also us! If we all originate from the same Source and the same Spirit moves through each of us, then what I do to another, I ultimately do to myself. When I cause another person pain, I contribute to the pain of the whole. When I offer another person love, compassion, healing, or forgiveness, I contribute that to the whole as well.

I believe Jesus understood this deeply. Perhaps this understanding is what continually brought him back to the heart, checking himself against love and Spirit to make sure he was walking with integrity rather than being led by the desires of the human ego. His connection with God wasn't something he used to place himself above humanity; it became the place from which he served humanity.

And the more I revisit his teachings, the more I see someone who was willing to stand against the religious authorities when their systems created separation, judgment, or hierarchy. He continually redirected people toward love, compassion, relationship with God, and inner transformation. I have come to believe that he was reminding humanity that we don't have to continually search outside of ourselves for someone who possesses the truth for us. We have to become quiet enough to discover the Spirit within ourselves and learn to recognize its voice.

The most important things Jesus was teaching us was not how to stop being human, but how to notice the difference between the voice of ego and the voice of Spirit.