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Awestruck Church's weekly podcasts.
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Awestruck Podcast is a hero’s journey to the center of you. Have you ever been awestruck? We were meant to live in this transformed state of attention, not just long for it or experience it rarely. It is the real. It is what makes you real. To be spellbound, captivated, filled with wonder, held in aesthetic arrest, awestruck. It is in this state of wonder that we find our ability to find ourselves. To be real. And to accept real truth that transforms us into everything we long to be.
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“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” — Mattew 5:9Di Awestruck Church
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Discovery begets truth. Begets transformation. And discovery begins with exploration. The impulse to explore has largely been stunted in our time by the erroneous assumption nothing remains to explore. We’ve mapped the earth. We have GPS systems to tell us exactly where we are at any given time. We’ve been to the moon. We’ve sent probes to Mars and…
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“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:8Di Awestruck Church
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“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Matthew 5:6Di Awestruck Church
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“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5Di Awestruck Church
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“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Mt. 5:4Di Awestruck Church
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“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Mt 5:3Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Di Awestruck Church
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Doubt is mostly viewed as a negative trait or as even as the opposite of faith. We think this way largely because we imagine doubt and faith in still life, or rigidly defined - devoid of motion. Such attempts at crystallization lose sight of the inner dynamics and play when we struggle with doubt. When we doubt, a number of forces arise within us: …
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We have unwittingly exchanged the active experience of being alive in the present for living in a dank library filled with atomized facts that we read not with just our eyes, but with our whole physical bodies. We willingly plug ourselves into a matrix of technology and information that, given the right combination, can summon fleeting fulfillment …
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Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, not light them for themselves; for if our virtues did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike as if we had them not. William Shakespeare Such words capture the essence of a latent power within us, awaiting the spark of purpose to ignite. From our first breath, we are cradled in potential, but our world orbits…
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To see is to discern with clarity what is… C.S. Lewis addressed what he saw as the oncoming blindness to what is in his book The Abolition of Man. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are p…
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Acceptance - we yearn for it in our inmost being. We long for others to accept us as we are, and yet we are terrified that who we are - which includes our shortcomings, our fears, our secret stories of horror, the terrible things we have thought and done - will repel others and deny us the very acceptance we seek. And so we don costumes, adapting s…
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Our modern way of thinking has created a false dichotomy between truth and experience. We have become obsessed with the reduction of truth into facts: atomic sentences and numbers and equations that we can use as a periodic table of elements. But this obsession holds no real power. No matter how well you know that two parts hydrogen and one part ox…
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Our quest for peace - contentment, rest, fulfillment - is, paradoxically, most often filled with frustration, anger, exhaustion, and even rage. Make more money, acquire necessary things, secure fulfilling relationships, and fulfill sensual desires. Over and over again, great obstacles present themselves. Storms arise. Obstacles roll over us. People…
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Without conscious and concerted effort, our focus will always be on ourselves. What we want. What we need. What we'll do to get what we want and need. This focus reveals our purpose - which, if we are honest, is to bend the world and all that is in it in our favor. We desire to be seen and to be valued, and with this focus we devise actions that wi…
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What gives? The sun gives light and warmth. A mother gives milk and hugs and nurture. Birdsong brings smiles. The forest offers solace. The moon and the stars above give a sense of awe and perspective below. Friends provide comfort. Children bring joy. Trees bear fruit. Sheep provide wool. What takes? Light pollution takes away the splendor of the …
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To attain what we desire most, we mistakenly believe that we must move forward, acquire more, learn much, guard relentlessly, achieve fame, win awards, and stockpile power. And yet, our true desires are never met by our effort, ingenuity, or winsome charisma. Our true desires - the ones that emanate from the ground of our being and refuse to quiet …
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Desire is a divine gift that stirs the soul, prompting us to pursue its fulfillment. Yet we often corrupt divine desire by conflation and control. We conflate love with lust, which drives us to see the other as a utilitarian object to fulfill lustful desire rather than a divine being with which to seek meaningful presence. We conflate joy with happ…
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We long to be seen and celebrated for that which is deeply good and worthwhile in us, and we long for a love that is strong enough to contain our frailty and sinfulness. Something in us knows such love is a transforming power. - Ruth Haley Barton When Adam and Eve hid from God amidst the trees of the Garden of Eden, clad with fig leaves sewn by tre…
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Desire is so fundamental to our nature that we often overlook its significance. Its guiding force. We are created - designed - to desire and to be satisfied. Desire and satisfaction were part of Paradise before the fall. When God created the world and saw that it was good, he rested. When Adam and Eve worked the garden each day, they would stop in …
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Change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world. Theodore Roszak The prevailing mode of consciousness today might be captured in the word materialism. Philosophical materialism suggests that all that matters is matter, and everything that occurs does so strictly within the material world. Practical materialism, which flows from…
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One of the most harmful and yet least examined impulses of human nature is that of judgement. In silent milliseconds, we can observe a fellow human being and decide if he is worthy or unworthy, right or wrong, good or bad. And with that judgement, just as quietly but more deadly, we condemn. We From our judge's chair while draped in our robes of bl…
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The ruthless elimination of worry is key to peace in the present moment. We worry when we direct our focus to something we want beyond our current grasp of control. We cannot abide the uncertainty of achieving our goal, and this state of consciousness produces anxiety. We then believe that to overcome anxiety and find peace, we must create methods …
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Within us is a yearning to experience being - life in its fullest capacity. This divine desire propels us on a quest to find - to seize those experiences that bring us closer to true being. And yet, too often in our haste to experience the fullness of life, we conflate the spiritual well that activates and actualizes being with tactile, temporal of…
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As the science vs. faith battle wages to determine who is right and what is real, what each can miss in this philosophical tournament is the opportunity to lift up their eyes and see beyond the coliseum that hosts it - and walk outside, leaving the weapons and armor of the game behind and embracing the search for being. Science creates rules that g…
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When our inner being is filled with divine light, our eyes emanate that light, and help us navigate this life in truth and love. But when our inner being is full of darkness, our eyes will be equally dark, and everything we do will will be nothing more than stumbling in that darkness. Today we focus on the connection between being and doing, and ke…
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Created things pull us outside ourselves. We fix our attention on objects, and so our mode of consciousness becomes objective. We assume that the pursuit of the external will, in return, bring us reward as the objects of our attention come to us. And yet, no matter how hard we try, the external cannot cross the threshold into our inner being and sa…
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To fast is to return our attention to ourselves - our spiritual center - our souls. Its easy to lose touch with our center when we allow the outside world to seize our attention with its sensory, sensational, sensual offerings. And when we focus on these things that couple only with our physical selves, we become self-centered. Egocentric. And, let…
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Our modern ears interpret the word pray as ask God to give me something I want or need. But the word pray used in the Greek text of the Bible means, literally, to move towards the will of God - so that our will might be exchanged for his. We see this meaning in play as Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion. Fat…
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Creation is an act of generosity. Generosity is an act of creation. To create is to gather the resources available to us and shape them into something new and wondrous for others to experience. To be generous is quite literally the same thing. And yet, how many times do we cheapen and pollute our works of creation by scribbling our name all over it…
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The ego longs to be seen and admired, and all those who fall under its narcissistic spell see the world as their stage. Abandoning their true selves for the sake of thunderous applause, they live their lives in performance. But, as with all performances, the script has an ending. The actors take their bows. The audience goes home. The stage falls s…
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Love and belonging is what we seek. And when we fail to experience love, we fail to experience being. We become broken, lost wanderers in a wasteland of desperation, impatience, entitlement, greed, addiction, and emptiness. Our substitutes for love forever fail to fulfill, and we flounder. Conversely, when we experience intimacy with another, we ar…
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