TO LIVE SIMPLY...GET OVER YOURSELF

You wonder sometimes why you are permitted to make mistakes in your choices when you sought so truly to do My Will in the matter. To that I say it was no mistake....Not to him who walks on with no obstacles in his way, but to him that overcometh is the promise given. -- "God Calling," July 28-

There, that quote from today's "God Calling" gives the backbone to my chosen code: We have ceased fighting anything and anybody...which to me comes directly from the Sermon's Resist not evil.

A brief salute to the late Honorable John Lewis who I believe will be remembered along with King, Gandhi and other walking-around saints. In reading about Lewis, who I have learned studied and lived by the Sermon, I feel more settled with my inner discomfort that I have been nattering about for too long now. It takes inner discomfort to be willing to change...and then to loose it and let it go.

To cease fighting, to make an honest decision to attempt to cease fighting, has and does require me to "refrain from the inner violence of the heart" as Gandhi is quoted as saying about nonviolence. I tend to give myself points for not responding in kind to a snark or a snarl, but there's no "good behavior" in that when we're mentally responding in kind...we could just tape our lips shut, that won't get us still more spiritual growth.

According to me, spiritual growth has next to nothing to do with religion as such and religious opining in particular. It has everything to do with putting the other person first not just out on the freeway, which counts by the way, but in our own thoughts and prayers...and especially when our ego is demanding retribution for some slight (how aptly named is that?).

I'm convinced that doing it right by rote is not the path toward spiritual growth...by rote is just living by memory so we won't be wrong. Face it, nothing turns us to God faster than a personal foul-up. For that's when, invariably, the God of my understanding turns me to the fact that I have made a decision based on self that later placed me in a position to be hurt, and I've taken that out on another...no matter what it seems the other has done to me.

I'm a believer in keeping it simple...I really like Rohr's forgiveness is the religious word for letting go. Because isn't it? Isn't forgiveness just letting go of our own opinion? Then there's my current favorite, of course, get over yourself...which covers the Sermon in three words. Ah, to live that simply, there's life's key.

Thank you.