Hi Friends —
“Sir ... there’s a pile of manure behind the chair in which I was seated” is the funny line at the end of segment 7 of Joel Baehr’s talk about what to do when you’re at the end of your rope. As he says, it was a clue that brought him to peace and eventually to healing.
This is the audio tape that we need to play and play again when we’re at the end of our rope. Joel’s message is so powerful that I’ve had it transcribed so that you can read as you listen and I’ve got it segmented so that you can return to the spirit-filled sections that speak directly to you and your condition.
Your condition is you, but “those pagan rascals” inside you have their roots in your childhood and your upbringing. As Joel affirms in segment 11, it’s not your fault. Your mother and father did their best and you have come to peace with that. Why then are you still being punished?
Mother’s Day is in two weeks. Father’s Day is five weeks later. The time between the two is what I call my “Season of Healing,“ when my intention is to heal my parent wound and to love myself into wholeness.
I invite you to do the same. It is time to know that there is a pile of manure behind the chair in which you are seated. It is time to be be healed. It is time to clean the junk out of your soul. It is time to know that God’s not gone, that we must hang tough and keep our peace with the parent wound.
I am so happy to be able to share this with you.
Sunday, April 29, 2018
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02 Joel's Story
I could hardly speak anymore. I would take a deep breath and get a sentence started, and after I got it started I could keep it going pretty well, but I’d keep talking until the air was all gone, and then I’d go for another breath. I could sing. I could laugh. But I couldn’t get my words going.
Even to this day, I sometimes have trouble with certain words. I have trouble with my name sometimes. People say, “What’s your name?” And I’ll say, “B,” and I can’t get the word Baehr out. But it’s almost gone. Almost totally gone now.
It’s called spastic dysphonia. The vocal cords get jammed up in your throat. And it would be great if you could turn it into some some kind of increased appeal, like Humphrey Bogart did with his speech impediment, but this makes you sound like an old man who just had a good cry. Came on imperceptibly as long as a couple of years before it became obvious. I can remember having trouble reading aloud, with my head tilted in certain ways.
We tried everything, from home remedies, to prayer and fasting. Nothing worked. It was as though some foreign power was strangling my throat. After neither prayer nor surgery worked, I was forced seemingly so, I was forced to come to the conclusion that it was time for me to quit my job as a minister and do something less vocal, because nobody could diagnose me. We had no idea what was my problem.
Speech therapists at our university worked with me with no avail. They didn’t know what was the matter with me. An ear, nose and throat man did surgery on my nose, suspecting a draining sinus, so I guess my nose was made straighter and better, but my voice remained the same. I thought, “What did Job do when nothing worked?” Remember the story of Job, about how his children were all killed, his prosperity was abolished, his health was destroyed? His wife said, “Job, why don’t you renounce God and die?”
To which Job responded, “Thou speakest as one of the foolish women.” But the pressure mounted until Job changed his tune. Before long he was saying, “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said there is a man child conceived. For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me.” Then I, and bear with me, because my greatest fear was getting up in front of people and talking. Greater than the fear of death, which I had the opportunity of confronting a number of times when I was overseas.
But back to Job, after all the counseling Job was still speaking out of a state of depression thing, “I am of small account.” The Lord responded saying, “Gird up your loins like a man. Will you condemn me that you may be justified?” Well, Job’s misery is legendary. Nothing worked for him. That is, until he had a totally new insight. The turning point came when he said, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.”
03 The turning point
What do you do when nothing works? For every person it’s different, but generally speaking I’ll tell you this. Number one, you can’t believe in your fears, and number two you’ve got to persist in knowing that in the words from the book of Job, God can do everything through the one who sees the truth.
Then, if you reject your fears, if you keep the faith, the good you got by virtue of your ego but lost will be doubled by the virtue of God.
Back to my situation. My relationship, my situation, everything in my life was chaotic. But in the nick of time, and who says prayer doesn’t work, some lady called the church and told someone on our staff that she knew another lady who sounded just like me. So I called that lady, the one that sounded like me, and she sort of did, a little. And she said that I sure sounded like I had what she had, and she told me to call Dr. Dedo at the University of California in San Francisco.
I talked to his most knowledgeable secretary, Sandy, who after listening to my voice said, “Yep, you’ve got it,” and she proceeded to tell me all about myself. She says, “You can sing and you can laugh, but you have a terrible time talking.” I agreed with all that. And she continued, “You hate to talk on the telephone,” to which I totally agreed. I hated talking on the phone.
The treatment of spastic dysphonia is new. The one thing that has worked to some measure is to cut the nerve to one vocal cord and to learn to talk better with the other one. So having considered the hazards, we proceeded. It wasn’t bad. I couldn’t talk above a whisper and my increase in vocal power came very slowly. Four to six months and longer. But talking or whispering didn’t hurt me. So I got all the amplification I could for my lecturing and kept squawking away.
Now as I write this, 10 years after the thing started, I can holler. I can even sing again, sort of. I can carry on a conversation in a car or in a restaurant, which for years I couldn’t begin to do, because as soon as the sound level rose above a library quiet, I was totally outgunned. The psychological hazards of a handicap can be a real hassle, and after a few years of it, you just want to avoid people. You don’t want to communicate because it’s too much work.
When the problem moved in, it sure seemed to bring all its aunts and uncles along, and unquestionably those pagan rascals simply had to be eliminated. Everything was strained around the house, because I didn’t want to talk to anybody. The wife and kids, they all sort of worked around me. My own integrity was suffering, because how could I counsel with others when I couldn’t talk decently myself? I seemed to be helpless at the hands of some seeming negative force.
The question for me was, what do I do when prayer fails? I’m the one who should be illustrating how it works. In my dream-like reveries, haunting me from the back of my brain were crowds of people asking like some chorus from a Greek play, “Show us how it works, Rev, show us how it works.” And I’m left contemplating the question.
04 Tape of Joel
I’m going to play for you, just a bit of a tape that I pulled out of our files. This goes back a few years. We had to turn up the volume. We had to amplify so much, that we could just barely get my voice over all of the amplification sounds, but I’m going to play a little bit of this so you can ... it’s about 45 seconds worth. It’s a story I told. This is the way I used to sound.
“There was a young lady who was taking an examination in psychology, and her professor asked the question to explain the cause of depression. She thought about it, and she got more frustrated, more frustrated. It was Christmas time. She wanted to go home. All of this was in her mind. She finally in desperation said, ‘God knows. I don’t. Merry Christmas.’ So the professor graded her paper and sent it back to her and he wrote, “God gets a hundred. You get zero. Happy New Year.’ It wasn’t that the professor was hostile, it isn’t that God is hostile. It’s just that unless we learn to function according to the rules, we can put ourselves in counterproductive situations.”
That’s enough of that, but that’s sort of the way I used to sound.
05 Why is this happening to me?
I’d ask myself, and this went on for years, why is this happening to me? I suppose everybody struggles with the classic questions, what’s the cause of this? Am I going to get worse and worse, until I can’t speak at all? Since nobody knows what’s the matter with me, is this totally psychosomatic? Is this all in my mind? Am I going crazy? If it’s psychosomatic, then what’s the cause? I pondered the questions for a long, long ... As well as those around me did. Why? What caused it? What’s the matter with Joel?
There are very few of you who have dealt with spastic dysphonia, but there are multitudes of you who have asked the same questions about other challenges. I know you. You’ve asked, “Why me”?” I’ve worked with you, with arthritis problems, emotional difficulties, cancer, depression, alcoholism. Perhaps you have yours to add to the list. And nobody really understands your predicament, right? Nobody else has experienced your embarrassment, right? I understand.
People are wonderful about it. I had so much loving help from so many home remedies, like inhaling steaming vapors, to the nature of my sex life, to somebody’s realization that I’d been hanged in a previous lifetime. Another had the dream that I had been guillotined. Another, that she saw somebody strangling me, to all kinds of things. I fasted for a while on nothing but lemon juice and cayenne and a spot of pure maple syrup, 24 days. But my parishioners began to get concerned about the color of my skin. I began to turn gray. It’s not even I got antagonistic, because I’d avoided food for such a long time.
Along with this, people were praying for me. Year in and year out, they kept supporting and praying for me, and I’m praying for me, which might conceivably put me here as a minister ordained and trained after the tradition of Jesus Christ, in the position of responding to somebody’s question, “Will you please pray for me,” with a forthright and honest answer, “Why? Does it work?” After all, 1001 people, one being me, had been praying for me and the results were that I was getting worse.
So a logical suggestion would have been for me to call off all the prayers before I was totally done in. So the question goes, “Why me Lord? Why me?” I think any good atheist would have given a little, “Hip, hip, hooray,” for the way prayer was apparently working on me.
06 Affirming that prayer always works
You know don’t you? You know of course that I’m not such a religious antagonist that I’m going to profess the unworkability of prayer. Quite to the contrary. I believe that prayer always works. It’s just that you and I, we have to learn how to work it successfully. In Parker’s book, Prayer Can Change Your Life, the authors show how people who prayed in certain ways, actually got worse. Leading us to realize that prayer does not work for good automatically.
People have thought so, because they believe that there was somebody up there that they were talking to, and you were either healed or not, depending on his choice. If not healed, then it was obviously your business to be sick. Folks, prayer works according to the level of your faith thinking skill, not according to God’s desire for you. God’s only desire for you is total wellbeing. Jesus repeatedly indicated that if we have faith, we can be healed. If we have faith, all things are possible.
The faith of a couple blind men facilitated their healing. The woman who had been hemorrhaging for years, was healed by her faith when she touched his robe. The power of your faith does not somehow determine how God is going to treat you. God has already given you the kingdom with pleasure. The power of your faith determines how you are reacting to the life, the love, the goodness, that is already yours. Even as the prodigal son turned from the husks that the pigs were eating to the abundance that was always awaiting him in his father’s house.
Jesus said, “The true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” “God is spirit, and his worshipers,” said Jesus, “Must worship in spirit and in truth.” That’s in John 4:23-24. The word spirit, comes from the word breath. If God is more like an omnipresent breath, then prayer is a matter of getting into the spirit of things. Prayer is lifting one’s mind, conscious and subconscious, out of the awareness where he or she is supporting the problem into the awareness of spirit, or into a more spiritual, less earthy, less human way of seeing things.
07 What do you do when you're hopeless?
I realized I was stuck in something and I didn’t know how to get out. I knew as James said, “The prayer of faith could heal the sick,” but obviously my faith thinking power was being misdirected. It was like some gyroscopic activity, some compulsion that I couldn’t get to do what I wanted to do. Its momentum seemed to be carrying me with it. I felt like I once did in the Caribbean when I took a fully outfitted radio Jeep down to the beach to wash. But as soon as I stopped, the sodden sand beneath my wheels turned to water. I was totally helpless and the tide was coming in. Had it not been for some friendly Seabees, their six ply truck and a winch, my condition, needless to say, would have gotten steadily worse.
So what do you do when your Jeep’s about to be washed away? I’ll tell you what you do. Number one, you hold to the truth that God is the spirit of good that is never apart from any situation, regardless of appearances. Regardless how fast the tide is coming in. Number two, realizing that, you keep the faith because when you cling tenaciously to the good which is God, things will have to take a turn for the better, sooner or later. Why? Because God is good, and it is the law of mind that you must ultimately out picture that which you habitually think.
First, you must hold to the truth that God is the spirit of good, regardless of appearances. Never apart from any situation. Too, you must realize that you must keep the faith, because when you cling tenaciously to the good, then things will have to take a turn for the better. All of which is to say, “God’s good is never gone, so hang tough.”
My favorite saying through all those years, was, “It’s just experience.” With that statement, I could always objectify the situation. You don’t have to go around making great statements of truth. All you have to do is have an inner feeling that regardless what happens, God’s here and everything is going to work out alright. I found that if I committed myself to being healed by such and such a time and then wasn’t, it was a real emotional setback. This is generally brought about by some new “cure” that somebody has suggested to me. One time it was acupuncture. Another time hypnosis.
I’ve got to tell you this story. I went to this very posh place. Oh, it was nice. All glass, and beautiful furniture. So beautifully appointed. White carpets. I went in, accepted by the receptionist, taken into the room where the doctor was to come in. I sat down in this big easy chair and he came in. We talked. He ran me through some testing, then he had to leave the room for a while. I’m one who does not sit still for long, got up and sort of stretched me legs and looked around the room, and I saw right behind my chair ... You won’t believe this. A pile of manure on the white carpet.
I wondered what was going on a little bit. I sat back down. He came back in, and we discussed things some more and I was ready to leave, and I decided this wasn’t right for me. I told him when I left, “Sir, I would want to tell you this, because I don’t want anybody else to run into the same situation. There’s a pile of manure behind the chair in which I was seated.” Maybe that was my clue. Maybe all the outer things, were not the effective approach to the solution.
08 Getting to peace
So anyway, I finally got to a little more philosophical point where I decided that if I was never going to talk again, if I was never going to be able to communicate again, fine. Fine. I’d do something else. If I could never sing again, fine. As a lady named Corrine once said, “Not singing on the outside, will just intensify the music in your soul.” The issue was no long about healing the voice, the issue was one of being at peace and it was a key point for me.
At peace. Be at peace. Live, and be free of fear and embarrassment, without hassle, fuss, anxiety, I just proceeded with my life. Nothing profound. No great realizations. Just a matter of to the best of my ability, knowing the truth and keeping my cool. I knew that somehow, in some way, things would work out. God is infinitely disposed for good. If your disposition and my disposition is good, then it holds that a good outworking must happen somehow, sooner or later.
I read about Therese Neumann, who experienced the stigmata, which is bearing the marks comparable to the crucified Jesus, who was in a terrible illness, and she saw a light that was brighter than the sun, and a voice asked her her desire to be well and strong, or to remain ill. Unlike the average person, she said, “It’s all the same to me. Whatever God wills.” She was healed because if you are at one with the peace of God, regardless of appearances, everything works together for the good. It has to.
It’s probably not untypical for us to look into our lives and find things that we can blame for our conditions, and various elements appeared in my life. One time there was a power struggle in my ministry, and when we returned from a vacation, I was notified by the board of directors that I was unceremoniously fired. That I couldn’t even make a statement, because as of that very minute, I was no longer a part of the ministry, so anything I said was not relevant. After a few rounds in the ring, so to speak, the hostile board members quit and went away with their supporters and I was rehired a month later.
Also, the kind of an experience where you go home and find a sheriff sitting on your doorstep, serving you with a summons saying that somebody out of your past thinks that you need to give them some more good. How do you feel when you lose your job and you get sued? We could total all the stress up and end up traumatized by the shock of it all. Or you could look at it and say, “You know, It’s just experience.” You need to know that you are just cleaning the junk out of your soul. So don’t rant and don’t rave. Just do your best to get rid of the garbage that’s been piling up and let it go the way of all good garbage.
09 Your problem is you
You need to give life the old one-two. One, God’s not gone. Two, hang tough, so that three, you can keep your peace. If you’re stuck in some situation, one of the things you’re going to have to decide is how are you going to feel about yourself. You’re asking yourself, “After all, what did I do to deserve this? I’ve been going to church regularly. Look at what that person gets away with. I was just minding my own business and some crazy person drives into the back end of my car,” whatever.
Folks, there are thousands of people and thousands of reasons that seemingly cause innocent people like you to be miserable. You may decide that you have good reason to be angry, that it was totally the other person’s fault, and that you certainly qualify for a little sympathy even if you have to give it to yourself. You could just go ahead and sit around holding those feelings. That’s your option, but you realize that those feelings boiling around within you are building and shaping your body and your world.
As absolutely as there is such a thing as psychosomatic disease, that you can’t experience anger or fear without an immediate impact on your body, there’s also got to be a psychosocial dysfunction that is that your mind is not only the managing influence of your body, but also of your world. And when you feel sorry about your own condition, you are number one, not accepting the responsibility for your own situation. Even if it seemed that it was caused by others, you didn’t have the consciousness to avoid it.
Number two, you are not letting your extremity be God’s opportunity. It’s your business to develop the spiritual faculties to lift yourself out of the situation. What do need to develop? More love? More organizational skills? The ability to say no? More understanding? There’s no time for pity. There’s only time for the game and the pleasure of “pressing toward the goal of the high calling”, as Paul said. You can be sweet and cheery to other people, but if you’ve got an anger, or bitterness, or resentment, any emotion that is contrary to feelings of caring and courage and self worth, then you are doing to yourself what a worm does to a good looking piece of fruit.
Did you ever cut a plum or and apple or a peach in half, only to find that something was there before you, tunneling and eating away. Listen, you don’t need any of those quiet little rascals inside you. But that’s what those negative feelings do to your body. To your life. So you need to get off of your fundament, friend. There’s no time for sitting around and feeling sorry.
10 Being more aware of the problem
Being a member of the cloth, I did that. I had an abiding guilt about having this health problem. And I plead guilty to it. Somehow obviously, my problem had become more dear to me than the solution. My subconscious evidently felt that the way things were was just fine. Was just right. Despite all the stress it was putting me through, and I was hanging tough with this idea, it was hanging tough with the idea that its job was to strangle me every time I tried to talk.
It was apparent that the program in my subconscious was stronger than all the conscious effort I was making and all the money I was spending on being healed. As I think about it, it appears to be a strange paradoxical phenomemon. I totally accept the fact that my problem was mine. I created it. I’ve always considered myself a creative person, but why should I create something like that? My faith in the problem was greater than my faith in the solution.
I think this is an important realization. Important for me, important for you, when something is stuck in your life. We are more into the awareness of our problem than the solution. For example, I know a certain man, who seemingly can’t demonstrate prosperity. He’s a painter by trade. Presently living in one of the most prosperous areas of the country. There’s new building everywhere, but he’s living out of his car, which isn’t running. After helping him in every way I could, he calls my wife and complains and bawls me out royally that I hadn’t done enough to help him. She called his attention to the many cries for help in the local newspaper, but he wouldn’t give them a call, said they didn’t pay enough.
Everybody but he could clearly see that he was creating his own problem. Of course he blamed me and everybody else. His poverty was in his mind, and let’s face it, my throat situation was in my mind, and friend may I suggest that your problem is in yours.
11 It wasn't my fault
In recent years past, I was still working out the question, “where did the responsibility lie in my case?” If I believed in the devil, then he could be a prime suspect. I could say that I was possessed, therefore it wasn’t my fault.
But really, I’m much too wise for such an archaic belief as that. The fact of the matter is ... Now listen, because this might very well be the cause of your problem too; that the problems lie with my parents. Had it not been for the way they treated me as a child, had it not been for the programming they put in my soul, my life would be entirely different.
See, the situation was this. My mother, a wonderful, radiant soul, worthy of every blessed thought you might think, was raised and married under the collar of total submissiveness, rendering her incapable of exerting much power when it came to matters of the family, and what to do to manage her hyperactive elder son, me. My dad, was the ultimate disciplinarian, in its severest sense. He would never say a bad word or curse word, but also would never give an indication of love or caring. His critical gaze could wilt a 2x4, let alone me.
I think the only word of praise I ever heard from him, was when I overheard him say to some other people one night when I was supposed to be asleep and I was listening through the door, and he said, “That boy sure can milk cows.” I lived on that for the rest of my life. His scoldings at home and around others brought me to tears so many times when I was little, that whenever I became the focus of attention, regardless of who was involved, I would spontaneously began to tear. I would cry. I couldn’t stop it.
I remember one time, I was in the sixth grade. It was music class time. I’d stand up before the class and somebody started singing ... How does the song go, “Can she bake a cherry pie Billy” ... They called me Billy, “Can she bake a cherry pie Billy Boy, Billy Boy, dah dah dah dah dah dah de charming Billy,” you know how the song goes. And the tears were running down my face. The embarrassment that I suffered caused me to fail courses in college because I refused to stand up and give oral exams.
My neurosis sorely inhibited my ability to function, and that which I did do, I acted out in an extroverted fashion in order to completely forget myself to overwhelm my own fear. Emotions, and eyes, and vocal cords are closely tied. All of this is of course, an over simplification of the problems of my childhood, but more details become redundant and violate one of the commandments. Suffice it to say, I at least can deduce that my problem was in all likelihood the result of the psychological trauma I suffered, and there was physiological trauma too, come to think of it. Because I grew up during the depression, didn’t have very good food. Fell on my head one time doing a back flip and fell 35 feet in the hay mill. Got stung by ... All kinds of stuff.
12 Why then am I still being punished?
I feel a lot better now, because I know that my problem is not of my own doing. I have a clear understanding of why this all happened to me. As judge and jury, I can now declare myself innocent, this is wonderful. I’m free at last. But ... Why then after all this logical deduction was I still being punished? Why, after the realization, the realization that I wasn’t responsible for my problem, did my problem not immediately disappear?
Why? I’ll tell you why. Because just like the painter, my problem is not in the realization of all the things others did or are doing to me, my problem is what I’m doing to myself. All of which is to say that you just can’t cop out and be healed. You are responsible for your problem. I believe that my parents were my own soul choice. That there was that in me that they reflected. In a sense they are pictured a part of that which is unconsciously me, so the hassle Dad gave me, was a mirror image of my own subconscious. However that would work equally well with my mother and the wonderful support I got from her was a reflection of the support system within my own soul.
I could have been born in 1939 and missed the depression, but I couldn’t wait. I had to get here 10 years earlier. Some choice. The thing is this, we all must learn to accept the responsibility that, “My life and my experience is happening through me, and the same thing for you.” My Dad’s behavior, the depression, everything that happened to shape my life, happened through me. Or would you rather think as much as the world, that I should believe in a capricious universe? A universe of accidents and bad luck. Then I could say it was God’s will for me to have my particular set of problems.
I could then speak of how unlucky I’ve been. In so doing, I could give my life to the Gods of caprice and have plenty to complain about for the rest of my life. This is precisely what multitudes of people do. For a lifetime through, with a resignation that covers their bitterness and their lack of courage, make comments like, “Oh, if my parents had not gotten sick, then I could have gone to college, and my life would have been totally different.”
13 Accept the responsibility of living
Friend, it’s my belief that if you and I can accept the responsibility for the dilemma we’re in, then we’ve come a long way in our spiritual evolution. Not because we know how to witch hunt out all of the mistakes of the past, but because we accept the responsibility for putting ourselves where we are, and proceed to make the adjustments needed to pursue the goals set up by Jesus, which is to be as perfect as possible. Be as perfect as possible. Be perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect.
As long as we hold other people or circumstances responsible for our problems, and we refuse to do the thing that is most needed, which is to develop the skill of living so we don’t have to go through the same thing again. As sure as I believe that God is love, I believe that God is law. By the law of divine mind, everything, from the most primitive forms of life and seeming lifelessness, the composition of the cells and activities of your marvelous brain, and in all of this there’s a fundamental system.
The better we function according to the system, the better our lives. I don’t believe in accidents. I don’t believe in luck or caprice, I believe that consciousness creates effects. If you want to change the effects that you are experiencing in your life, then you’ve got to alter some soul of yours. You’ve got to change consciousness. You’ve got to redo some of your attitudes.
14 When things look tough, what are you to do?
So, when things look tough, what do you do? When the prayer that never is supposed to fail, fails, then what’s the next step? The next step is this. Regardless of how things appear, how long they’ve drug on, how impossible it all seems, how emotionally wrung out you are, know this. One, God is never gone. God is the spirit of good in everything. God is never gone.
Two, hang tough. That means to never stop having faith that God’s not gone. Never stop believing that somehow everything will work out for good for you. Three, be at peace. No matter how bad things are, if you can do number one and number two, which is knowing that everything is working together for good, because God’s still in the game of life, then you can do number three, which is to sit yourself down, turn off the world, and find some peace.
Don’t sit down and feel sorry for yourself. Do much of that and you’ll start believing yourself. Don’t blame others. You bought the whole thing somewhere in the history of your soul, so see it though. Accept the responsibility for everything in your life. Study truth. Sooner or later, the truth will set you free. If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re discouraged beyond your belief in prayer, then what you’re saying is that you need more than God is providing. That’s like saying you need more light than the sun can give. Sooner or later you have to pass a rational glance in your own direction and conclude that the deficiency is not in God or the sun, but in yourself.
As the Lord said to Job, “Gird up your loins like a man,” which means don’t be a wimp, or be strong in the Lord. All of which is to say that you may as well hang in there with a positive attitude instead of a negative one. The sun's going to keep rising and setting and you’re going to be healthier and happier if you just put your head on straight. So think it through. If you and God are a team, how can you lose? You’re dealing with the divine idea of winning, that was behind Vince Lombardi and Red Auerbach combined. But your coach is spelled with a capital C. Things may go different than you expect, but lose, never.
So what’s to say then in summation? The first thing that comes to mind is the scripture where David says in Psalm 8, “What is man that thou are mindful of him, but made him a little lower than God and crowned him with glory and honor.” Your first responsibility to yourself is to never lose heart. For always keep the faith to know and to feel that you are someone special. Friend, your words, your thoughts, your feelings, quickly affect your body. Negative words and feelings have an immediate impact upon you, but positive joyous words and feelings will harmonize and regenerate your body.
Even if you don’t feel it, start speaking words like, “I am a phenomenal creature.” Say it with me, “I am a phenomenal creature. I am God incarnate.” Say it, “I am God incarnate.” Say, “Life is wonderful and I feel magnificent. Life is wonderful and I feel magnificent.” What a marvelous, regal word, magnificent. Musical setting for Mary’s words in Luke 1, “My soul does magnify the Lord,” is called the Magnificat. Magnify. Like a magnifying glass. You a magnificent soul can cause your good to expand and expand. Say it, “Life is wonderful and I feel magnificent.”
15 God needs you to be complete
It’s a medical fact. I’ve heard doctors say that the cells in your body will respond to such a declaration in wonderful ways. So if you want to have a good feeling about yourself, develop it. Realize that God needs you to be complete. Until the soul who develops its fullness of expression or the greatest ideas in the universe remains unfinished. A unit of expression is functioning but partially, and that’s you. If you take a moment to contemplate yourself and the glory of your being, I’m convinced that you’ll at least feel a twinge, an inkling of the truth that you are an archetypal being.
You see, there are archetypes and prototypes. The archetypes are the originals, the prototypes are the patterns. Most people think they are the prototypes, but they aren’t. Everybody’s an archetype. That’s because everybody’s a divine original. There’s only one you, and it’s time for you to see and to feel yourself as a marvelous, unique, magnificent embodiment of the Christ God in you. The last thing you are, is ordinary or typical. You are archetypical. You are one of a kind. Always keep that in mind, so when things go awry, don’t fuss. Don’t complain about a loss of money or time or anything else. You’re the champion who has evolved enough to handle the challenge at hand.
Nothing was interrupted. The timing was right for you. Your soul drew it, or allowed it at this time, so my archetypical friend, handle it. As long as you’re going to think like a victimized nobody, you’ll find people who agree and then you’ll be sure you’re right. That won’t be hard to do, because most of the people in the world, feel like victimized nobodies. That’s because they don’t know who they are.
You see, you are learning who you are. I’m telling you who you are. You are the place where the presence and power of God are trying to express as they did through Jesus, only through you and your own inimitable character. It’s time for you to start acting like a saint. Start thinking, feeling, acting like an enlightened soul. You’re likely to act and feel miserable sometimes, but forget it and get back to the business of being a small g God like Jesus said. I suspect that most of the time doing something wrong isn’t near as bad as all the thoughts we have about it.
It seems like what most people do, most of the time, is to watch what other people do and then make judgements about them. I got a bike that’s new to me. When I first got on, I went pedaling sharply one way, then over corrected the other way. But it would be ridiculous to sit down and make condemnations about every ungainly movement. I just kept on and quickly everything was alright. Yet of every zig and zag that comes, people carry on something terrible.
What good does the criticism and guilt do? It focuses the attention on that which is furthest from that which you should be thinking about and really wanting. I don’t know what your problems are. If you lost your voice, I could understand that. Perhaps you lost your vision, or part of your body, or a loved one. So deal with it spiritually. There’s a time for crying, but there’s a time for the tears to stop and the work to begin. Chances are somebody else is in the same boat, so when everything fails, what do you do? You’re not going to sit down and feel sorry for yourself, at least not for long.
16 Get yourself free
Why should you program your soul with a bunch of self pity? A bunch of flowers would be better. You’re not going to blame others, are you? That includes parents, right? You’re going to accept the responsibility for yourself, so that you can do something about it. Like studying the truth, so you can get yourself free. Part of the answer of overcoming that which seemingly won’t be overcome is this, that regardless of appearances, regardless how grim, God has not left or forsaken you. God, the everywhere present spirit of good, is not gone.
In Genesis 28, the inspiration of the Lord came to Jacob saying, “I am with thee and will keep thee in all places whether thou goest. I will not leave thee.” Jacob said, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not. How awesome is place said he. This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven.”
Friend, could it be that the same might be true for you? At the place wherein you are, might be the gate of heaven and you knew it not? Number one, God is not gone. The spirit of good envelopes you. Number two, believe in step number one. Believe in God. Sooner or later, your faith will pay off. Hang tough. Number three, be at peace. If you know that everything is working together for good, which is number two, for those who love God, number one, then you can be at peace, because you don’t have anything to worry about.
So regardless of appearances, God’s not gone. Have faith. Be at peace. Because for you, my archetypical friend, there’s too much good out there to be missed, so say with me, “Life is wonderful, and I feel magnificent.” Say it, “Life is wonderful and I feel magnificent,” and believe it, because that’s the truth about you.
