New Year

Some bad habits can be transcended. Some can be diminished. Some will never be transcended or diminished. There is always the option of faith in the present moment. Hope is for a better future, but now is not the future. Hope requires us to live in the future. Hope is a form of insanity. Faith is about dropping a bad habit in this moment. Faith allows us to draw on a deep sense of our value as human beings with the certainty of union with God. The truth of this value can set us free of any bondage of the mind. It is a moving sea of reality, ordained by God by virtue of our unique birth and purpose as a minister of the Holy Spirit.

We cling to fearful thoughts which strengthen the habit's hold. We feel a primitive ring of threat surrounding us, often springing from our earliest experiences. It is an imperfect circle of brokenness. It is a raw-edged boundary of deprivation, abandonment and psychic shadow. Our core knows that without protection and love we will die.

With painstaking honesty, we can learn how to protect ourselves and how to create loving relationships, but that core -- that primitive core -- knows that it is threatened with extinction. Extinction means to put out. We may live with the knowledge that we could have been put out by the neglect or abuse, but we were not put out. In some manner that we will never see, we kept our integrity. We have persistent fear that holds us, but we have always managed to think in such a way as to take care of ourselves. We are damaged, but sane.

A power equal to the fear is the energy that surrounds us in the Holy Light of our value as a person. That value is the truth which has superseded the truth of the neglect and abuse. Each of us is worth love and care -- worth all the love and care that we can possibly experience. Whether we create it for ourselves or accept it from God and other beings, it is the Holy Cloud which replaces the ring of threat forever.

Our task is to face the joylessness and emptiness and sense of abandonment which provokes self-damage. Our task is to take ownership of our perfection in the eyes of God and our salvation from our mischief through the advocacy and atonement of Jesus. No matter how thoroughly one is rejected or abandoned, one is wrapped in that moving sea of reality. We have validity, consequence, fully developed power and the right right to BE. There is no doubt as to our wholeheartedness without the habit. We must own that reality and drop the habit now. It is no longer necessary to keep us from floating into oblivion and death. Our psyche is intact. Our spirit thrives, full of life, power and integrity.