Our pastor told a story this week about Mother Teresa. In the story, her younger self had a dream about starting an orphanage with three pennies. Upon waking, she was so moved by the dream that she went to her Mother Superior and told her that she wanted to start an orphanage with three pennies.
The Mother Superior was incredulous. "You can't start an orphanage with three pennies. You can't do anything with three pennies."
Mother Teresa is supposed to have responded, "Oh, I know I can't, but with three pennies and God I can do anything."
It has been happening for so many years that I am not sure why I continue to be surprised when similar messages come to me from several directions at the same time--the same spiritual lesson that I am supposed to learn at that point in time. The Mother Teresa story was on the heels of some reading I was doing just before I went to bed the night before.
A couple months ago I wrote about my quest to complete my reading of several books on my nightstand before starting any new ones. With the fast approach of summer-reading season, the pressure is on. I finished two last week, and I am nearing the end of Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love. The book has probably been on my night stand longer than any others, perhaps two to three years. I am not sure why I struggle with it. Perhaps it is the writing style because I resonate with the messages, and every time I pick it up what I read is a meaningful reminder. Maybe I just need to pick it up periodically for a message.
In last night's reading, Williamson quoted A Course on Miracles, "If you are trusting in your own strength, you have every reason to be apprehensive, anxious, and fearful." Then, she writes, "...none of us have the capacity to work miracles, with the power that is in us but not of us, however, there is nothing we cannot do." (P.188) Hmm! Remarkably like starting an orphanage on three pennies and God.
Clearly, there is a miracle that I should be thinking about delivering with God's help. However, since my business crumbled so painfully in the dot.com Bust, bringing my personal life down with it, I have not allowed myself to dream of making miracles happen. I haven't made a conscious decision not to dream. The ideas that used to flow almost continuously just haven't been coming. My hope-generator seems to be semi-permanently stuck on "off." Quite frankly, I don't know how to flip its switches back to "on." What comes to me is that is the miracle for which I should be enlisting God's help.
Showing posts with label making miracles happen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label making miracles happen. Show all posts
Monday, June 15, 2015
Monday, July 21, 2014
Becoming a Miracle Maker
Yesterday I wrote about time travel, and one of the challenges of traveling backward in time is that we can't change history. While time travel forward does carry some challenges--we don't know what will be possible in the future, by that very "limitation," we are freed to create a world where all things are possible.
Forward time travel is actually something that we do frequently in coaching. Using the vehicle of visualization, we lead our clients to imagine their heart's desire. The imaginings are true in future time. By being able to strip our world of constraints, the intention is set for the future. Nothing is impossible. Marching back to the present--its own version of time travel as we "go back" from future time to today--we can map steps to our intended future.
Just think: all thing are possible. With passenger planes full of AIDS researchers being shot down by guerillas, and yet one more war starting in the Middle East, the weekend that has just passed felt to me like the world was unwinding at its seams. But that is now. I can imagine a world at peace five or ten years from now, and it is so. "All I need to do" is to time travel back to today and do what I must do to set the wheels in place to enable world peace. Nothing is impossible.
When I used to do professional speaking, I would ask my audiences to think deeply about the single most important thing that each of them would have to do to create the world of their desired future. Then I would challenge them to do it...consciously and consistently...until they had changed the world.
The whole world doesn't need to change, I would say to them, just a critical mass to pull the rest of the world with it. Some believe that critical mass may be as small as one percent of the world's population. None of us is superfluous. What we choose to do, or not do, can literally change the world.
I've just finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster's delightful children's book, which I truly believe cannot be at all appreciated until adulthood, maybe even years into adulthood. In the book the protagonist is Milo, a boy who is sent off on a great quest by King Azaz, who says that there is one thing that he cannot tell the lad until he returns. The secret is that everyone "knows" the quest is impossible, but they don't want him to know until he tries it. Of course, the predictable occurs: Milo accomplishes the challenge through a serious of harrowing encounters with demons. It is only when he returns that Azaz tells him that the quest was an impossible one.
If each of us traveled forward in time and created a world that we'd like to live in, what impossible quests might we take on? As I write, two pictures come to my mind's eye. The first is of Mother Teresa walking onto the battlefield during one of the several Middle Eastern wars that have occurred during my lifetime. It is said that this little sprite of a woman fearlessly walked onto the battlefield, and the guns stopped. Most everyone would have thought that impossible, but she didn't know it was impossible. Like Milo's quest, Mother Teresa's was possible because she decided it was possible.
The other picture that comes to mind is that of Jody Williams, a housewife turned activist, who was appalled by all the people who were killed or maimed by landmines left from wars. For several years before her death, Diana, Princess of Wales, became an eloquent spokesperson for a coalition promoting an international treaty to disable the landmines. Since its enactment, the treaty has been responsible for the disabling of over 46 million landmines. An impossible task? Of course, but neither Jody Williams nor Princess Diana knew it was impossible, so it wasn't.
Instead of calling Forward Time Travel by that name, perhaps the term we should really use is stepping into our ability to make miracles. Whether in our personal lives or on a global scale, when we travel forward in time and envision the world in which we'd like to live in the future, we step into miracles. When we set about doing our parts to make them possible, we become Miracle Makers.
I don't know about you, but I can't imagine anything I'd rather have in my obituary or on my headstone than "She was a Miracle Maker." Today, just as each of us does, I begin etching that phrase by the acts--large and small--that I choose.
Only once have I asked readers to forward a blog post, and that was December's "Could we Change the World in 30 Days?" which launched the Grocery Store Game. Today, I am asking it again. Each of us knows "Miracle Makers" who need encouragement. Each of us knows someone(s) who needs to live in the future where all things are possible so that they can change the world. Please share this post and every bit of encouragement you can render. There is so much we can do...when we choose it.
Forward time travel is actually something that we do frequently in coaching. Using the vehicle of visualization, we lead our clients to imagine their heart's desire. The imaginings are true in future time. By being able to strip our world of constraints, the intention is set for the future. Nothing is impossible. Marching back to the present--its own version of time travel as we "go back" from future time to today--we can map steps to our intended future.
Just think: all thing are possible. With passenger planes full of AIDS researchers being shot down by guerillas, and yet one more war starting in the Middle East, the weekend that has just passed felt to me like the world was unwinding at its seams. But that is now. I can imagine a world at peace five or ten years from now, and it is so. "All I need to do" is to time travel back to today and do what I must do to set the wheels in place to enable world peace. Nothing is impossible.
When I used to do professional speaking, I would ask my audiences to think deeply about the single most important thing that each of them would have to do to create the world of their desired future. Then I would challenge them to do it...consciously and consistently...until they had changed the world.
The whole world doesn't need to change, I would say to them, just a critical mass to pull the rest of the world with it. Some believe that critical mass may be as small as one percent of the world's population. None of us is superfluous. What we choose to do, or not do, can literally change the world.
I've just finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster's delightful children's book, which I truly believe cannot be at all appreciated until adulthood, maybe even years into adulthood. In the book the protagonist is Milo, a boy who is sent off on a great quest by King Azaz, who says that there is one thing that he cannot tell the lad until he returns. The secret is that everyone "knows" the quest is impossible, but they don't want him to know until he tries it. Of course, the predictable occurs: Milo accomplishes the challenge through a serious of harrowing encounters with demons. It is only when he returns that Azaz tells him that the quest was an impossible one.
If each of us traveled forward in time and created a world that we'd like to live in, what impossible quests might we take on? As I write, two pictures come to my mind's eye. The first is of Mother Teresa walking onto the battlefield during one of the several Middle Eastern wars that have occurred during my lifetime. It is said that this little sprite of a woman fearlessly walked onto the battlefield, and the guns stopped. Most everyone would have thought that impossible, but she didn't know it was impossible. Like Milo's quest, Mother Teresa's was possible because she decided it was possible.
The other picture that comes to mind is that of Jody Williams, a housewife turned activist, who was appalled by all the people who were killed or maimed by landmines left from wars. For several years before her death, Diana, Princess of Wales, became an eloquent spokesperson for a coalition promoting an international treaty to disable the landmines. Since its enactment, the treaty has been responsible for the disabling of over 46 million landmines. An impossible task? Of course, but neither Jody Williams nor Princess Diana knew it was impossible, so it wasn't.
Instead of calling Forward Time Travel by that name, perhaps the term we should really use is stepping into our ability to make miracles. Whether in our personal lives or on a global scale, when we travel forward in time and envision the world in which we'd like to live in the future, we step into miracles. When we set about doing our parts to make them possible, we become Miracle Makers.
I don't know about you, but I can't imagine anything I'd rather have in my obituary or on my headstone than "She was a Miracle Maker." Today, just as each of us does, I begin etching that phrase by the acts--large and small--that I choose.
Only once have I asked readers to forward a blog post, and that was December's "Could we Change the World in 30 Days?" which launched the Grocery Store Game. Today, I am asking it again. Each of us knows "Miracle Makers" who need encouragement. Each of us knows someone(s) who needs to live in the future where all things are possible so that they can change the world. Please share this post and every bit of encouragement you can render. There is so much we can do...when we choose it.
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