Prosperity from my point of view

I wanted to talk about Prosperity from a different aspect today.  I admit I was having difficulty writing anything down.  But I also reminded myself that Spirit will come….so, I waited, and listened.  And this is what came forth.

We’ll have a conversation…I’ll help, but you are asked to participate.

Let’s start….

The 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with her hair fashionably coifed and makeup perfectly applied, even though she is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today.

Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready.

As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, the aide provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on her window.

“Oh, I just love it,” she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.

“Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room …. just wait,” the aide said

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged…it’s how I arrange my mind. And I’ve already decided to love it …”

“I make decisions like that every morning when I wake up. I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or I can get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do.  Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away . . . just for this time in my life.” (NTST May 2010 Talk 1)

What comes to mind from this story?  What are the important points?  What’s the message?

Attitude is Everything

Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate.  He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say.  When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I’d be twins!”

Jerry was a manager in the restaurant business, and a unique thing often happened with him.  He had waiters follow him around from restaurant to restaurant. Why?  Because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator.  If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.  Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him, “I don’t get it!  You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?”

Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ‘Jerry, you have two choices today.  You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.’  I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it.  I choose to learn from it.  Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”

“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” I protested.

“Yes it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice.  You choose how you react to situations.   You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It’s your choice how you live life.”

Soon after than conversation, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. Jerry and I lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of just reacting to it.

Several years later, I heard that Jerry did something you are never, never supposed to do: he left the back door of the restaurant open one morning.  As a result, three armed robbers held him up at gunpoint.  While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. One of the robbers panicked and shot him.

Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins.  Wanna see my scars?”

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” he replied.  “Then, as I lay on the floor bleeding, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live.”

“Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

Jerry continued, “Not at first.  The paramedics were great.  They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room, and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, then I got scared.  In their eyes, I read, ‘He’s a dead man.’  I knew I needed to take action.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’   Over their laughter, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.”

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully.  Attitude, after all, is everything.  Choice is all there is.  (by Francie Baltazar-Schwartz)

What did we learn from Jerry?

The new insight in Truth is that consciousness is the key to all things that happen to us. The starting point in changing your life to an experience of abundance is the realization that you can change your life by altering your thoughts. You begin by taking responsibility for your own life

Life is fundamentally a matter of growing, a growth experience. That’s what we say we ARE in our Vision…Unity of Rehoboth Beach is a vibrant and inclusive spiritual community, dedicated to growth and transformation through the exploration of universal Truth.

We may have set backs along the way, as a Spiritual Community and as individuals.  Sometimes we miss the mark.  But that is part of the process.  When we miss the mark, in any situation, we learn from the missing and adjust our aim to the target.

The word prosperity comes from the Latin root which literally translates: ‘according to hope’ or ‘to go forward hopefully.’ Thus it is not so much a condition in life as it is an attitude toward life, as we learned from Jerry and our petite, 92 year old lady.

There is something magnetic about our attitudes that attracts us to circumstances in keeping with the nature of those attitudes.

The atmosphere with which we surround ourselves becomes in a measure the magnet of our destiny.

There is none else but God, in me and my world. Therefore, there is only good, only wisdom, only life and health, only abundance, only safety, peace, and joy, in me and my world.

There is none else but God in my home. Therefore, there is only beauty, peace, warmth, opulence, and love in my home.

There is none else but God in my dear ones. Therefore, there is only beauty, only health and strength, only intelligence and wisdom, only joy and peace in my dear ones.

“For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”