Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
This week’s message: New Names for God
I have been asked many times by members of the media if I could capture the one message God wishes to send to the world in a single sentence. I have always accepted this challenge gladly, because I believe that I can put what God is saying to the world into five words.

“You’ve got me all wrong.”
This is the single most important message of Conversations with God, and once we embrace this message, we can open the door to all the wonderful explorations that naturally follow. Yet if we are unwilling to embrace or accept that we are mistaken about God, there is nothing further to discuss.
What the world now needs is the courage to acknowledge is that there may be some new interpretations of this experience that we call Divinity that could be just as valid as our ancient ones.
The Conversations with God books, for instance, suggest that there are at least seven words that could be used interchangeably with the word “God” without materially altering ultimate meaning. These words are:
Love
Life
Joy
Peace
Freedom
Change
You (Me, Us)
The first four of these present no problem, because they create no conflict with our present thinking. The last three are challenging, because they shift us into new paradigms, invite us to confront new concepts, force us to acknowledge that we may not have finished all the thinking there is to do about God.
This week I invite you to do just that: think — really think — about these new ways of looking at God. Check in with yourself to see how your conceptual framework about life would shift if you thought these words were truly interchangeable with the word “God.”