During this season of gratitude, few things have grown with deeper appreciation than the realization that nothing outside of my world is where to find answers to life’s challenges.
The ability to choose ones own thoughts is an amazing source of spiritual freedom. Thoughts create our world. In our beginning years, seldom are we taught to have our brain work for us. Yet what we are and what we have or are experiencing is the result of the thoughts we have long entertained. And what will be tomorrow is what we are thinking and doing today. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Proverbs 28:3.
Too often we attempt to find peace “out there.” We maintain conditions by habitual thought patterns. In order to blaze new thought trails of freedom, we must make new pictures by choice and word that lift us to a greater experience by the Power of God (Good) that radiates outward from our Inner Kingdom.
Do not focus on what appears wrong or unmended in the world. That is what, as Clarissa Piloa Estes, doctor of philosophy, calls “Spending the wind without raising the sail.” Worry about “what might be or may happen” is spending the wind. Instead, build a better tomorrow by finding some good in today, bless it and move into tomorrow with a greater sense of gratitude.”
Rev. Patricia Ballard is pastor of the Oroville Center for Spiritual Living.
