may day

Someone from my high school located me online and called me last night. Surprise!

He said "Tell me what's been going on with you?"

I thought that was a rather loaded lead in. I was stumped. I didn't feel like talking right then and made the excuse of it being late and we'd talk very soon. My mind reeled as I was hit with rolling waves of lost opportunities, shame, embarrassment, disappointment and self loathing. What's been going on with me? Hmmmm. How could I fill someone in on twenty seven years of a turbulent life in a phone conversation at eleven pm?

Twenty seven years!!!

I am astounded by the thought.

In the last twenty seven years I've buried lovers and friends. I've survived diseases and suffered incomprehensible demoralization. I've lost nearly all and returned to my childhood home to lick my wounds and start over. Basically I've been through hell and have been brought back to find myself with a blank slate. Despite all the humiliation I've endured I am healing and I am hopeful. I am on a search for spiritual enlightenment and am eager to begin a new life of service and ministry. How do I tell someone that?

I share these things all the time. I share my story with others often so that they may, hopefully, benefit from my experience. But I haven't necessarily shared my story with successful people from my past with businesses and children and stock portfolios and summer homes. With all the work that I've done, the self searching and moral inventories I continue to take on a daily basis, I find I am still paralyzed by fear, envy and pride.

So how can I be rid of these amorphous hostile adversaries? I might begin by pin-pointing the precise location of my emotional discomfort and from there I might be able to see exactly what it is that's at stake. Here I find it is my self esteem and emotional security that are threatened. By entertaining fear, envy and pride I'm nurturing a monster that actually has the power to kill me. I realize that I am one hundred percent responsible for my own experience. How can I access an antidote to this agonizing condition?

I am entirely ready to be relieved of these things. I'm sending this message out into cyberspace and I am offering it to anyone who can identify with having the absolute readiness to have their short comings lifted.


Divine Breath of the Universe:

Please remove my fear and direct my attention to what You would have me be.

Please allow me to be willing to do the right thing regardless of personal consequences.

Please let me be ever mindful that financial success, romance, real estate and legacy are not answers to the nagging and insidious soul sickness from which I suffer.
Please allow me to walk honestly through whatever fear I have as I realize it is only through truth that I may discover freedom.
And please let me always remember that there can never be a material solution for a spiritual problem.

Amen