Magic Carpet Ride

February 9, 2014

A new week is beginning tomorrow. Are you filled with enthusiasm?

Can you sense the God-given potential that is in front of you? A “new you” and a “new life” where you perceive you need it?

Any day, any moment in time you have a God-given opportunity to take a look at your life, to see where you have been, what you have accomplished in the past, to take a real honest look at where your life is now, and the trajectory you’d like to see it take from here.

In other words, you have an opportunity for a reality check, to take a look to see if you are on track living life the way you’d like to.

How often do you take the time to check to see where you are right now in consciousness and perhaps release a few things from the past that you have dragged with you, complaining, and yet at the same time have been unwilling to let go of?

Earlier this week I had a conversation with an acquaintance who told me – and I’ll put this in my words – that when he comes up against people who moan and complain that he tells them to “put down their story.”  No too many sentence further and he was telling me how he had been wronged some number of years ago; how some, now former friends, acted against him and how it was wrong, and how he wished it was now, different… but he just couldn’t deal with the other people involved.

At one point he stopped and mused, “Maybe I should put down my story about that!”

“I think it would serve you well to do so,” I said, “and forgive too. Forgiveness will allow healing to occur.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s just that these people are so arrogant and self-centered. They just don’t get it. I’ll never be able to be around them, and besides……” and he was off to the races clutching tightly onto his story and keeping it alive.

For a moment there, I thought he was going to put it down.

Yesterday Tom Newman spoke for a few minutes at the funeral for a friend. I suspect kind words were spoken about the deceased. Imagine if my acquaintance was invited to speak at a service honoring one of “those people” by whom she was offended? Imagine him talking this way, “Oh, she was pigheaded, a master at holding onto old hurts. She was angry, self-righteous and opinionated. It just too bad she never “saw the light.”

Clearly we have all have flaws. I love this statement from A Course in Miracles, “Our job is not to be without limitations, but to overcome them.”

Every single day you have the opportunity to begin, again, and to create a whole new pattern for your life if you so desire.

Shel Silverstein, in his writings speaks of the opportunity that is at hand in a little quip entitled “Magic Carpet.” He said:

·        You have a magic carpet
that will whiz you through the air
To Spain or Maine or Africa
if you’ll just tell it where.
So will you let it take you
where you’ve never been before?
Or will you buy it drapes to match,
and use it on the floor?

Are you willing to step onto that magic carpet of life? Are you ready to take off this week, and take the experience of your life wherever you want it to go?

Within each you lies that beautiful God-given potential. You are a children of God.

Some months ago it was commented to me that, as the minister, I really had to practice what I preach.

In my opinion practicing what we preach is the only way to live… and that the days of living a split life need to be dissolved.

Taking to heart the idea put forth in A Course in Miracles that ((Y)our job is not be without limitations, but to overcome them,” you can see that you needn’t expect yourself to live a mistake-free life according to your highest vision all the time, but I would say that it is important not to allow yourself constant leeway.  I’m suggesting that you must continue to call yourself to a higher level of expression (which you can do), and to live your life honestly (which you also can do). If you make a mistake, realize that you made a mistake.

Now, let me put a finer point on this: It seems to me that mistakes made with the attitude of, “I don’t care,” or “whatever…” are harmful.  “Honest” mistakes as we call them are not harmful when (1) you recognize the mistake, (2) you don’t try to project it onto someone or something else… and (3) when that issue comes up again you handle things differently because you stopped to think instead of acting out old patterns.

(Put on top coat) Here’s a mundane story about not acting out of old patterns. Before I went to unity Village for my initial interviews and testing I thought I should bring a top coat with me… but I didn’t own one. Jane and I went to the Salvation Army store in Boulder. I went to the rack that had a few men’s top coats on it. (As an aside, I will tell you this, I don’t think a single business man in Boulder, Colorado wears a top coat. That’s very “un-Boulder.’ J)

There were a couple of men’s topcoats but they were both shabby and not my size.  The next thing I know, here comes Jane carrying a top coat, the one I have on now. Not only did it fit me but it’s like brand new.

Where did you find this I asked? It turns out that the coat had been mis-marked as a woman’s coat and was on the women’s rack!

Jane wasn’t bound by the old patterns: men’s topcoat, men’s section. Her vision of possibilities was expansive: “What I’m looking for isn’t in the place I’d expect it to be; might it be in some unexpected place?

I saw a cute posting – I think it was on Jane’s FB page – it read, “When the past calls, don’t answer. It doesn’t have anything new to say.”

When the past come calling you don’t have to “go to the same place’ you’ve always gone, go someplace that may be different or unexpected for you: God, forgiveness, prayer, gratitude, compassion, etc. You might be surprised at what you find there!

Live a new life; a life in which you look for and see the beauty present.

Today I’m going to end with a picture. Holding a picture in the mind is very powerful. I saw this saying on the back of this man’s t-shirt at the Subway restaurant in Pendleton last summer.

Live a life so the preacher won’t have to lie at your funeral.

I think that’s good advice.