Spiritual Solutions

You’ve heard of the saying, “It’s a hard act to follow.” And that certainly might be said about the story of the resurrection. However, I suggest it was not a hard act but a heart act. It was a heart act, an act of love, of reaching beyond seeming human limitations to draw on the strength and the power of the living God.

We can follow that heart act in our own lives. Even in the midst of our losses, even in the midst of challenges and when we don’t understand them there is a presence and a power to draw upon that is enfolded in and contained within us, the very love of God. The presence of God is the presence of love within us; our true nature is that of love. As we let that be our focus we can begin to make our lives a heart act instead of a hard act.

We often struggle with our lives and make it a really hard act. But we can change that and instead make it a heart act. Sometimes it comes through suffering and loss. When we experience challenge or loss, our hearts often seem to become paralyzed, we don’t know what to do, we become stuck, and we are not able to move on. We get in our heads to see what’s going on and we don’t come into our hearts because it’s just too painful.

It reminds me of the true story of a young man who was twenty-four years old and had bone cancer and had to have his leg amputated from the hip. He became a patient of Dr. Rachel Naomi Ramen, who worked with him for two years to try to bring him into a new sense of himself after the tremendous loss he had experienced. He was embittered, angry, and even full of hate toward people who were well.

So she had to work with him to have him understand that he had lost not only his leg but much more than that. He had lost the sense of his own personhood, the sense of his own being, the sense of his oneness with God. She had to help him reflect upon what had happened, to look at it and sit with it, not to avoid it but to look at it.

She had him draw his life and draw how his body looked, how he felt about himself, and to try to tap into his deeper inner self.

It was toward the end of the two years she worked with him that he really started to come out of it and he began to visit hospital patients that had experienced serious losses of their own.

He lived in Palo Alto, California, and one hot day he was going to the hospital wearing shorts and of course his prosthesis, his artificial leg, could be seen. He walked into the room of a young woman about his own age that was deep in depression because of the loss of both breasts. She was so depressed she wouldn’t even look at him.

The nurse had left the radio on in the room to try to cheer her up a bit, but she was just lying there with her face turned away from him. At first he didn’t know what to do, so to get her attention he unstrapped his leg and took his prosthesis off. Then he started dancing around on one leg and snapping his fingers to the music. He came around the bed so she could see him dancing. At first she ignored him and then she took a little look. Finally she burst out laughing and said, “If you can dance, man, I can sing.” Her response to her loss changed in that moment.

Dr. Ramen said that, after the two years, she was reviewing his progress and they were looking through some of the drawings he had done. They came across a drawing of a vase that had a deep crack in it. She had asked him to draw a picture of his body as he saw it, and he drew the picture of the vase with the deep crack across it. She remembered that when he drew that, he was gritting his teeth with anger and rage and bearing down hard on that crack across the vase. He saw that vase as his life that was broken and would not hold water any more.

As they went through the pictures, he saw that one. He took it and said, “You know, this one isn’t finished yet.” And she said to him, “Well, would you like to finish it now?” He said, “Yes, I would.” He took a yellow crayon and he put his finger on the crack in the vase and he said, “You see this crack? This is where the light comes from.” And he began to draw streams of light coming out of that crack in the vase.

We can become strong at the broken places, because there is a power and a love there for us that endures and which we can draw upon through all situations. Yes, he had sustained a great loss but that great loss turned into triumph once he began to feel his own wholeness and he was able to touch people’s lives in a new way. Yes, he may have lost a leg, but he hadn’t lost his true being. That’s the important thing.

What is the image that you carry about the losses in your own life? Is it time for you to revisit that image and let the light of God’s presence stream forth with new life? It’s a heart act you can follow.

Remember, God is Blessing You, Right Now!

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Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham, a Unity minister for over forty years, invites you to subscribe to his free inspirational newsletter, Spiritual Solutions.

Please feel free to publish this article in your blog or newsletter or share it with a friend, as long as you include this resource box.

If you’d like to receive weekday inspirational quotes, you can subscribe at Rich Words.

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(Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2)

We Live in a Universe of Thought

Albert Einstein called the fundamental laws of our universe “God’s thoughts”; the latest thinking in physics supports the idea that, as Einstein’s fellow physicist Arthur Eddington said, “The stuff of the world is mind stuff.”

Swami Sivananda writes that “Thought alone is the whole world, the great pains, the old age, death and the great sin, earth, water, fire, air, ether.”

Thinking forms the stuff of our lives: the ideas that guide us, the technology that connects us, the wars that divide us, our jobs, homes, clothes, entertainments.

Thinking Shapes our Personal Responses

Thinking shapes our personal responses to this mind stuff.

Swami Sivananda; “Thought binds a man. Whoever controls his thoughts, is a veritable God on this earth.”

Our lives and affairs are completely influenced and shaped by the character of our thoughts. We are not limited by God’s will or by heredity or environment or by fate or circumstance – but by our own dominant state of mind.

The Unity writer, Imelda Shanklin, wrote: “Your mind is your world. Your thoughts are the tools with which you carve your life story on the substance of the Universe. When you rule your mind you rule your world. When you choose your thoughts you choose results. Your life is what you think: Think straight, and life will become straight for you.”

William H. Peck once said, “Your morning thoughts may determine your conduct for the entire day.” Optimistic thoughts will make your day bright and productive, while pessimistic ones will make it dull and wasteful. It seems practical and advisable to face each day cheerfully, smilingly, courageously, so that your tasks will be a pleasure to perform and progress will be a delightful accomplishment.

Think in the Heart

The Pueblo Indians told Carl Jung that all Americans are crazy. Of course he was somewhat astonished and asked them why. They said, “Well, they say they think in their heads. No sound man thinks in his head. We think in the heart.”

In Proverbs 23:7 we read “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (KJV)

To “think in the heart” is a form of higher seeing, or insight. Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of this higher seeing as true prayer when he says that prayer is “the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”

Charles Fillmore, in Atom-Smashing Power of Mind, speaking of this kind of thinking, says, “Every thought of goodness makes a place, a form, and sets up a friendly habit in the mind that is permanent and that in your time of need ministers to you. . . .  

“Your thoughts give back results of the same nature as themselves. If in the silence you have earnestly held to the pure and good, you have built in you a place for the pure and good. Every true thought has made a place in your mind.”

In Philippians 4:8, Paul instructs us in this way: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

And Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a master of Chabad mysticism, put it even more simply: “Think good and it will be good.”

In other words, look for the good and you will find it. For, as Charles Fillmore has said, the Spirit of good is working through you.

The apostle Paul sums it up this way: “You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on your hearts, to be known and read by all men; and you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”     (2 Cor. 3:2-3)

Remember, God is Blessing You, Right Now!

Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham

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Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham, a Unity minister for over thirty-eight years, invites you to subscribe to his free inspirational newsletter, Spiritual Solutions.

Please feel free to publish this article in your blog or newsletter or share it with a friend, as long as you include this resource box.

If you’d like to receive weekday inspirational quotes, you can subscribe at Rich Words.

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           May this Christmas find you blessed
            In many different ways.
      May your stocking be filled with goodies
          And may joy fill up your days.
        May your heart and home overflow
           With the beauty that abounds
      And may these gifts all be reflections
           Of the inner gifts you found.
      May your heart be as pure as Mary’s
          And your soul magnify the Lord
       May your mind be as open as Joseph’s
         That you too can heed God’s word.
       May you be as vigilant as the shepherds,
           And may you hear the angels call
          May all of your gifts honor Christ
      And may they be blessings for one and all.
        May you, in the manger of your heart
           Make room this Christmas morn.
            For unto you this very day
            God’s sacred child is born.
             It is a sign from heaven
            God loves you, this is clear.
         May this gift bless your Christmas
          And uplift your whole New Year.

(This blessing was sent to all the Unity ministers of the Southeast Region of the Association of Unity Churches by Rev. Bob Fortner, president of the region, and now comes to you courtesy of Rev. Alan Rowbotham, of Spiritual Solutions.)

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When something deep within you

gives a nudge

to do some kindly thing,

obey it.

When it suggests you smile

at a stranger, or utter some

appreciative word,

say it.

When the impulse is for good,

don’t question: “Will I rue it?”

It may be only you

are there to hear and heed,

to be Love’s instrument,

so do it.

How often, when we felt

discouraged and alone,

our faith at lowest ebb,

some word, some token

of reassurance came,

and through another’s voice

or kindly deed we felt –

oh, more than felt, we knew

that God had spoken!

                By R. H. Grenville

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