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July-September, 2016

Rules for a Happy Day

by Rev. Myron Jones, O.M.C.

My favorite time of the day is early in the morning before anyone wakes up. I start my day before I even get out of bed. I lie there a moment and think about God. I let appreciation and gratitude flow over me and then I surrender my self to Him. I offer my body, mind and soul to my Maker, and I ask Him to use me to help us awaken.

Then with coffee in hand, I sit on my patio, weather permitting, and in my sanctuary otherwise, and I decide what kind of day I would like to have. I don’t ask the ego this question. I get still, listen to the great variety of birdsongs in my yard, and I wait for inspiration. Nearly always, I know that I want a happy day.

Sometimes other words come to me as well. Today, what came is that I will appreciate this day. I will appreciate the people I work with, the customers I am going to see, the many brothers and sisters I will meet in my travels as I drive from town to town. I will be deeply appreciative of it all, the driving, the weather, the meals I will eat, each thing I do and see.

As these ideas came to me I began to feel overwhelming gratitude, and so I know I will have a day of appreciation and gratitude. This day will be given me if I make no decisions on my own. And really, I can’t make decisions on my own. For decision to have power, it must be made in union. So the only real question is, what will I make the decision with, ego or Holy Spirit?

I know the day I want to have. I want a happy day, a day filled with appreciation and gratitude. So, if I have something else show up in my day, then I know I must have made a decision with the ego. That’s okay, I can back up and undo that decision. In the Rules for Decision, Chapter 30 of the Text, we are given simple step- by-step instructions for making this correction.

Here is an example of how this works for me. Just this morning, as I write in my journal, I began to feel anxious. This is not part of the day I decided on, so I sat with it a moment. I let Holy Spirit guide me through the process. I am anxious because my Internet is not working and I am going to have to figure out a way to post my daily lesson and this journal entry.

I was happy a moment ago, and now I am not. So I must have joined with the ego and together we looked at the situation and decided what it meant. I have no Internet and so I can’t finish my morning work. This is bad. Then having judged the situation, I ask what it is I should do. The ego says I should go fool with the cables and try to make it work, but I have already done that and nothing I did worked. There is no reason to repeat the process.

The ego says I am so unlucky (unworthy) to live in an area where we don’t have good Internet service. Those guys don’t know what they are doing and if I call again I will be here all morning getting nothing done and miss work. I can’t do that. It’s hopeless. I feel discouraged and frustrated. Nothing ever goes right for me.

Well, you get the picture. The ego always sees everything through a glass darkly. It offers solutions that don’t work and its main purpose is to find someone to be guilty, me, the cable company, my work, bad luck, unworthiness, it doesn’t matter who or what is guilty as long as guilt is involved.

So what I want to do is listen to the Holy Spirit, to let Him tell me what to do. I hear Him say that it is going to be fine, not to worry. But the problem is, I have already decided what the situation means and it is not a pretty picture. How is sitting here doing nothing going to help? How can I not worry, for goodness sakes!

That’s the problem with asking the ego for an interpretation. Once I decide what is wrong according to the ego, the Holy Spirit’s answer won’t make sense to me. It won’t answer the question as I saw it. But all is not lost. I can cancel out the ego decision by saying that I have no question. I forgot what to decide. Yes, that’s exactly it! I forgot to decide to ask Holy Spirit to join with me, and so ego popped up to quickly take over.

So now that I have canceled out my previous decision, I ask the Holy Spirit to interpret the situation for me and I step back to let that happen. I am still for a few moments as I allow my mind to be put at ease. I begin to feel gratitude that without the distractions of the Internet, I have had time to do quite a lot of writing. This writing is very healing for me and probably will be for others. I feel grateful for that. I also begin to feel trust rise up in me and I know that what needs to be done will be done.

It is not always that easy. Sometimes I have a situation that triggers a fear in me and the fear gets away from me before I can make a quick reversal. When that happens it is sometimes hard to let go of the decision I made with ego and accept the Holy Spirit’s help. There is a process for this, too.

First I have to approach it gently because otherwise I will feel coerced. I’m already feeling trapped by the ego which tends to offer conflicting answers and which always increases guilt and fear. If I am not careful, the Holy Spirit’s help will feel confusing and like an attack and I will become angry.

So I begin simply. At least I can decide that I don’t like how I feel now. There, that was easy and also true. So it will be a simple thing to decide that I hope I have been wrong. And that makes sense, too. If I feel unhappy with my present choice then I naturally hope I am wrong about it. I need to get to this point because until now I have thought it was important that I be right about my decision about the situation. But deciding that I am not happy and that it would be better if I was wrong, I feel ready to move forward.

Having come this far, I can, in perfect honesty, say I want another way to look at this. Whew! Now I have changed my mind about the day. I started out wanting a happy day, a day of appreciation and gratitude, and somehow let my mind get stuck on the idea that I needed to be right when I am wrong. But now I am changing my mind. I am open to something else, to another, happier way to see this.

With an open mind, maybe not completely convinced, but willing to be shown, I say, “Maybe there really is another way of looking at this. What can I lose by asking?” This is the way I undo a wrong decision, change my advisor from ego to Holy Spirit, and go back to having the happy day I had asked for. Sometimes if the fearful thought has a strong enough hold on me, I might have to repeat this, but always it brings me back to peace.

I have been doing this practice for over a month now. I do it every single day and work with it during the day as needed. I am so thrilled with the results that I am offering a three day workshop in July, based on the Rules for Decision. I want everyone to have the chance to learn about, and practice together, these rules for a happy day. I want everyone to know the freedom and peace that I am gaining from this study.

If you think you would like to do this with me, visit my website for details. http://www.forgivenessisthewayhome.org

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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