ed young man saw a breath-takingly gorgeous woman walk past Chicos in the mall. He was so smitten that he followed her as she made her way toward the center of the mall.

The lady observed his reflection in the store windows as she passed them and finally turned and demanded: “Why are you following me?”

He responded innocently, “Because you are the most gorgeous woman I have ever observed, and I’ve fallen madly in love with you at first sight.”

The woman smiled and answered,” I believe you need to look behind you at my younger sister who is ten times more attractive than I.”

The excited suitor turned around quickly and noticed what he considered to be an average looking girl walking toward him.

“She’s no where near as attractive as you,” he lamented. “You tricked me!”

“No, you tricked me,” she countered. “If you were so madly in love with me, why did you turn around?”

“I…Ah…Well…Ah…”

His answer was a case of a ‘Definitely Maybe’! He claimed he definitely thought the young woman was the greatest thing since sliced bread — but next he thought maybe there’s better sliced bread.

What is amazing is, people do that all of the time. ‘Definitely Maybe’ people live their lives through a chronic ‘yes — no’ perspective. They short-change themselves because they ‘under mind’ who they are. They are decisively indecisive.

• Sure I can. Maybe not!
• I absolutely want that. Okay, maybe I don’t.
• I will never do that again. Or maybe….

“We are unable to serve two masters,” Jesus shares in Matt. 6:24, “for either we will despise the one, and love the other; or else follow one and hate the other. We cannot serve God and physical substance.”

What Jesus is saying is: ‘definitely maybe’ doesn’t work. You cannot steal second base with your foot on first. You cannot squeeze orange juice out of a peach. You cannot put the toothpaste you have squeezed out back into the tube. And you cannot walk the spiritual path on materialistic feet.

A ‘definitely maybe’ mind set typically ends up sending mixed messages. The following story is an example. A televangelist stopped a couple of girl scouts at the street corner and asked for directions to the post office.

“Down this street three blocks. You’ll pass girl scouts selling cookies, so buy some, then turn to your right,” the oldest youngster replied.

“You appear to be a smart young lady,” said the televangelist. “Have you ever watched my nationally televised show?”

“Nope”

“Well, if you will watch Channel 22 tomorrow morning with your folks, I’ll tell you how to get to Heaven.”

“Aw, I doubt it mister. You don’t even know how to get to the post office.”

What sort of mixed messages would we send if we affirm, on the one hand, that there is only One Presence, One Power, and One Intelligence in the Universe and then at the first sign of trouble give power to outer situations?

What if we say we are one with the Inexhaustible Source of our abundant supply — and then worry constantly about money?

We have the power to be persistent about our truth walks. We also possess the power to give away that power. Some folks like sliced bread. Others like an uncut loaf of bread. Some individuals choose slices of Truth. Others want the whole Truth — unbiased, uninterpreted, and non-dogmatic — so they can render their own interpretations. The important thing is to be able to stand for something instead of falling for anything.

One of the toughest jobs we’ve ever done as corporate teambuilding consultants was to help a very large health care organization “come clean.” The person who hired us was the senior executive Vice-President of Customer Care. We had worked with her before when she was an exec with another Fortune 100 company. When she left there she took us with her.

In her new role she was mandated to resurrect a customer care department that was hemorrhaging. After conducting the usual internal audits and interviews, systems assessments, 360 feedback, and customer surveys, we identified key pathologies, conducted aggressive team development sessions, stirred up the proverbial hornets nest; and, when all was said and done, made several recommendations, including what amounted to a 25% reduction in force. Our client acted on our recommendations and cleaned house.

You can imagine the upheaval, the surprise and disbelief that ran through her division. But it was necessary, because of the old beliefs and ideologies that ran head-on into the new vision. Not everyone embraced it! It was tough, but six months later, her Customer Care Division won a national award for service excellence.

We witnessed a similar housecleaning at Unity Village Spiritual Education and Enrichment Center. Students attended from all over the world and from all walks of life. Most were from a combination of Christian and New Thought backgrounds and many were in some kind of life transition.

The ‘coming clean’ we’re referring to usually came during days 4 or 5. After almost a week of mind boggling class discussions, homework, team projects, and peer discussions about Truth principles, the Bible, and metaphysics, a few of the students (probably 30%) suffered meltdowns.

The Unity term for this meltdown is chemicalization. When we receive life-changing information that blows our mind, our old programming resists the new information and we experience an internal upheaval.

Our definition for this chemicalization experience is ‘spiritual Alka Seltzer.’ Alka Seltzer is a great metaphor for that stirring up of things to burn off the old ideas and create that relief of a higher spiritual awareness: chemicalization.

That’s what we believe is happening in Matt. 21:12-14. Jesus has just made His triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Read Matt.21:12-14 to see what happens.

Here is the metaphysical meaning. You may want to fasten your seatbelts:

We believe this event describes a chemicalization experience! A spiritual Alka Seltzer moment. It happens inside our heads. It is a consciousness shift, a spiritual deepening. When we are in that state of receptivity we are ready for spiritual growth, ready for the Indwelling Christ to speak to us.

Growth usually comes when our Christ potential (our Jesus quality) creates dissonance in our old belief system (represented by the money changers) and turns our old beliefs upside down (the tables). When this happens, we experience chemicalization – Spiritual Alka Seltzer.

As we grow on our spiritual journeys, we are bound to run into moments when our old beliefs run head-on into our new-found understanding … and we may experience some form of chemicalization.

Go back in your memory bank to some difficult experience you have moved through in your life. Not something you are struggling with now, but something from your past. Pick something specific. Recall (without the emotional baggage) the struggle and difficulty of living through the situation. Consider how you grew – personally, professionally, and spiritually from the experience.

Once we drop in a few Spiritual Alka Seltzers we feel the sizzle of enthusiasm, the plop, plop of expectancy, and the fizz of the faith-lift we receive as our lives are transformed forever!

Ernest Hemingway tells the story about a young man who wrongs his father and then runs away from home to Madrid. Out of great love for his son, the father posts ads in a half dozen or so Madrid newspapers.

“Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana, 12 noon Tuesday. All is forgiven. Papa.”

When the father gets to the hotel, he finds 650 young men named Paco waiting for their fathers.

Forgiveness, it seems, is a universal human need. At its core it is the need to be pardoned, to be released from the emotional strain of having wronged someone or having been wronged by someone. At its essence it means going from bitter to better.

Forgiveness requires an emotional correction. It is an empathic response to a wrong doing. It constitutes an act of extraordinary consideration which oftentimes seems much too lenient, if not down right foolish. But forgiveness is not a doormat philosophy. Forgiveness doesn’t mean consent. Forgiveness is an act of release. Essentially it is emotional amnesty. It is truly going from bitter to better… from adversary to ambassador.

That’s what Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York did when he relieved a judge for the evening and took the bench himself in one of the poorest wards of the city. A case came up where a grandmother had been arrested for stealing bread to feed her grandchildren.

La Guardia told her, “Unfortunately, you are guilty, and I’ve got to sentence you. I’m fining you $10 or 10 days in jail.”

And then LaGuardia pulled a $10 dollar bill out of his own pocket and gave it to the astonished grandmother.

“I’m going to forgive you this time,” said the Mayor, “but I don’t want to see you here again.”

Then he fined everybody in the courtroom for helping to create a city where grandmothers have to steal bread to feed their grandchildren.

The bailiff passed the hat and the woman left the courthouse that evening both reprimanded and thankful. Not only had her fine been paid, but she left with $47.50 in her purse.

“We must forgive as we would be forgiven,” says Emile Cady in her classic Unity book, Lessons in Truth. “To forgive does not mean to arrive at a place of indifference… To forgive is to give some definite good in return for a wrong experienced.”

“Emotional wounds cannot heal until we forgive, “says Rosemary Ellen Guiley, in her book Prayer Works. “When we forgive, we experience a tremendous healing of body, mind, and spirit. It doesn’t matter whether we forgive a fresh wound or an old hurt; the liberating effect of forgiveness is the same.”

Jesus was asked by Peter in Matt. 18:21-22: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.”

The Christ’s answer in verse 22 is somewhat startling. If taken literally it appears we are being asked to forgive as much as 490 times. But we’re missing the point if we think Jesus is talking about a literal number.

Forgiving someone – or asking someone for forgiveness is an extraordinary human act of compassion and surrender. And yet it is something we must do for our own good…for our own sanity… for our own peace of mind. Forgiveness frees us from the past and keeps feelings of revenge, resentment, and anger from eating at us, from cannibalizing us.

There is another, more profound, meaning for forgiveness. Metaphysically, forgiveness means giving up the false for the true. Another way of saying that is it means giving up our fixation with fiction. The kind of fiction we’re referring to is our attachment to anything which blocks our spiritual growth.

And if it takes 7 times, or 700 times, or 7,000,000 times – to give up a false belief, to give up a false conclusion, to give up a self-defeating course of action or long-standing resentment, then that’s the amount of time Spirit gives us to get it right.

And getting it right means forgiving it right… right from the get go. That means going from bitter into better.

We’ve come to the conclusion that we think you should have an absolutely AWEFUL day today… We’re serious! We hope you have an AWEFUL day!

We want to be clear about what we are proposing. The kind of aweful we’re talking about is spelled AWEFUL… as in AWESOME! We want you to have awe-filled days the rest of your lives. Here’s a neat story to illustrate the awesomeness of going from AWFUL to AWEFUL.

Lightning struck a huge tree up ahead and sent it across the rain-soaked road. The driving rain was falling like liquid bullets. As the driver slowed to a stop, trying to figure out what to do next, another bolt of lightning struck a tree behind the SUV and fell across the road, trapping the driver and his very, very, very pregnant wife on Rt. 54.

Her contractions were minutes apart and he had to get her to the hospital. He got out of the truck to access the situation and instinctively ducked as another lightning strike splintered a towering pine tree nearby.

A few moments later, soaking wet, he jumped back into the truck.

“Honey, we’re trapped. There’s ditches on both sides of the road and the trees are so huge they’re blocking the road in both directions.”

“Thank God they didn’t fall on…” she stopped as one of her contractions hit, “fall on us!” she whispered.

“I’ve got to get you to the hospital,” her franticed husband announced.

Just then a pickup truck pulled up. The driver saw their predicament, told them to stay in the SUV, and explained what he was going to do. In no time at all he had the tree ahead of them cut into enough pieces to clear the way for them.

He refused any payment. He said he was going to stay long enough to clear the other tree out of the road too. Then he gave the couple a tattered business card sized note.

Worn and creased with age, the inscription on its face, dulled by the touch of many fingers read:

You’ve been helped in some way today by a Good Samaritan. In lieu of payment, please pass on the favor to someone else

The couple looked at each other and smiled their gratitude – and their surprise. Their old website address was on the back of the card. They had 1,000’s of the cards printed up themselves years ago after they had seen the hit movie Pay It Forward. Their own thoughtfulness and generosity had turned what could have been an awful experience into an awesomely AWEful experience.

2000 years ago, Jesus the Christ walked many a storm-tossed road Himself. He had plenty of opportunities to turn awful experiences into AWEful experiences. He raised the widow of Nain’s son, (Luke 7:11), Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:22), and Lazarus (John 11:1) from aweful experiences – they had all died! Their resurrections were AWEful experiences.

He healed lepers (Luke 17:12), a blind man (John 9:1) another blind man at Bethesaida (Mark 8:12), a blind man named Bartimaeus (Matt. 20), a deaf mute (Mark 7:32), a Roman officer’s servant (Matt. 8:5), two people with demons (Mark 5; Luke 8), a paralyzed man (Mark 2, Luke 5), a woman who touched His cloak (Matt. 9, Luke 8); and hundreds of other awful health conditions in His time.

Metaphysically, no matter how dulled, deadened, or comatose we become (that’s what Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain’s son, and Lazarus represent) we can be resurrected by the power of Spirit. No matter how sick we are mentally, emotionally, or physically, we can be healed.

No matter how far gone you think you are, the Christ in you can raise the deadened you, the frightened you, the vulnerable you. By the power and might of the Indwelling Christ within you can pray yourself, meditate yourself, visualize yourself, will yourself, affirm yourself, diet yourself, exercise yourself, and divinely order yourself into wholeness and happiness.

Our bodies are our biological address. How long we live there and how well we live there pretty much depend on us. Some people are in constant triage. Others enjoy perpetual health. For many people, a balanced diet is a beer in one hand and a pizza in the other. No matter how we treat our bodies though, we all have two things in common when it comes to health: Our bodies will last a lifetime – and our lifetimes will last as long as our bodies.

The alchemy of health is a mind, body, spirit equation. When all three are balanced we have perfect health. If they are out of sync, we end up like the character in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew who is paralyzed and can’t walk. (Matt.9:2-8)

The literal interpretation of these scriptures is fairly straightforward. The man is lowered through the roof and according to his faith and those who lowered him, is healed. It’s a poignant story, but its deeper metaphysical meaning takes its 21st Century worth to a whole new level of understanding.

• The Paralyzed man represents crippling thoughts that keep us stuck and immobilized, unable to move toward our good
• People carrying the paralyzed man = faith-centered thoughts refusing to see anything but wholeness
• Process of lowering man through the roof = a Divine Idea coming into our Christ Consciousness
• House = human consciousness
• Scribes = organized worldly thoughts
• Bed or mat = comfortable assumptions, badge of lack consciousness
• Earth = physical body
• Home = Headquarters, the Kingdom of Heaven
• Son of Man = that within us that knows the difference between truth and error; our enlightened personality that seeks oneness with our Christ Nature
• Evil = thoughts which deny our divinity
• Your sins are forgiven. Stand up and walk home = Eliminate your error thinking (give up the false for the true). Behold your wholeness by going to Headquarters

When we step out on faith and choose wholeness, despite the appearance of extremely challenging or immobilizing situations, we can transcend any of our crippling thoughts and habits, because there is that within us that knows the difference between truth and error. We’ve got two choices: we can deny the power of outer appearances or affirm our wholeness by recognizing the awesome power of our Christ Nature. That’s what Jesus meant when He said, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ (Deny the power of outer appearances) or ‘Stand up and walk’ (affirm your wholeness)?

All healing, emotional and physical, is the restoration of the harmony between us and our I Am Presence. It is a cellular connection. Healing is restoring wholeness. And wholeness suggests a pre-existent completeness. This completeness is the truth of us. The truth of our completeness does not depend on us. It’s there whether we believe it’s there or not. But the health of our cells, atoms, and molecules depends on the healthiness of our thoughts, images, and intentions.

Here’s the key to an alchemy of health: We cannot think Truth and error at the same time; so we cannot manifest Truth and error at the same time. Health follows Truth and sickness follows error. If we want the abundant life we’ve got to make choices that sow abundance. If we want health, wealth, and prosperity, we’ve got to make choices that sow health, wealth, and prosperity. All we have to do is eliminate our error thinking, take a stand for Truth by going to Headquarters (the Christ Presence within)…