I get these emails from Ralph S. Marston, Jr. every day called “The Daily Motivator (see email and credits below).

I’m often amazed that the writer can think of another interesting and new thing to say after 365 days!  Today’s message is a particularly good one so when you’re done with my blog, see the message below.

I read a book once…It was about the power of positive thinking and this little story was in it:

A couple had neighbors who had a patio light on in the back yard that shone into their bedroom window and kept them up all night.  It was a huge source of frustration & stress for them both.  To make things worse they had been fighting with the neighbors over it for years and asked them time and time again to turn it off at night, but with no luck.  As a result they spent a lot of time cursing out their neighbors and complaining about how horrible it was to live next to them.

Fortunately one of them read a book about how what we think and say can influence our lives.  So the couple decided to try something different; they changed their methods.  The first night they started praying (or thinking positively) about their neighbors…sending feelings of love their way and wishing the best for them (instead of griping about them under their breath). Of course it was hard to turn off the part of their minds that thought how much they disliked these people….but they thought “well what have we got to lose?  Let’s at least TRY to think positively about them.” So, they said their little prayer and went to bed….the VERY NEXT NIGHT the patio light went off and never came on again.

Whether you believe in the power of positive thinking or not….sometimes we just keep banging our heads up against the same problems over and over again when what we really need is a new approach and a new perspective.  If you find yourself with the same problems you had last week or even last year perhaps it’s time to try something new.  I don’t think you’d disagree that it wouldn’t hurt to TRY it at least, just to see what would happen.

Einstein said:

Insanity: is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.   Albert Einstein. 

And isn’t that the truth!

My father, Andy Andros, was a brilliant man with a good heart as big as a house.  He used to say this no matter how many problems he had and no matter how gloomy or grey the day was:  “This is the happiest day of my life” and truly IT IS.  That ability to put things into perspective and find JOY in the good things, every day of your lives ,is really one of the most important discoveries you can make.

Here is the email I was referring to earlier in my message:

THE DAILY MOTIVATOR

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Send love

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Instead of sending anger, send love. Instead of filling your mind with worry or frustration, fill your thoughts with love.

Send genuine love to those who support you. Send genuine love to those who disagree with you.

Let go of the need to get the last word, or to get even or to prove yourself. Send love, and you’ll find yourself living with unassailable strength and effectiveness.

Send love, and feel your anxiety melt away. Send love, and experience life at its highest level.

When you’re not sure what to do, do what is authentic, honest and caring. Move forward with love, for yourself, for life, and for others, and you’ll be moving toward good and valuable things.

Live a life that is real, and rich, and full. Send love, and live the best there is.

Ralph Marston

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The above message entitled “Send love” is the Daily Motivator email edition written by Ralph S. Marston, Jr. and he deserves all the credit for it!  Why don’t you consider signing up for his daily message by clicking on the link below.

Copyright (C) 2013 Ralph S. Marston, Jr. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Motivator web site at http://greatday.com for an archive of more than 5,000 daily messages, inspirational photos and more.

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Do you have family or friends that don’t believe in God who are scientifically minded & who consider talk about God a waste of time? I have a short story about how an idea about a bubble can help you to talk to your relatives about the existence of God. Keep in mind that it’s not necessarily our job as Christians to fully convince the people we witness to that God exists. It’s our job to introduce the subject to them; to simply open a door and then the Holy Spirit will do the rest of the work.

Let me explain….if you think about it, we live in a sort of bubble. We experience the world via our senses. Our eyes, ears and other senses are magnificent in structure & design and help us to understand the universe and its intricacies. Our ears can hear so many things – a lover’s whisper, a bird’s song, a screaming baby and a symphony. However, as incredible as our senses are, we can’t hear even half of what a dog can hear. A dog’s sense of hearing is 100 times more sensitive than ours and they can hear all sorts of frequencies and tones that we can only confirm exist by using sophisticated electrical equipment. That equipment shows us that just because we can’t hear those things doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We can’t hear those frequencies, but they are there just the same. In the same way we have to admit that there might be other things out there in the world that exist that just cannot be sensed by our limited senses. Just because we can’t hear the things the dog hears, doesn’t mean they don’t exist and just because we can’t see heaven or God doesn’t mean they don’t exist either.

For my argument to be just and honorable, I have to admit that it doesn’t prove there is a God. But what it does do is that it opens the possibility of a God. It opens a crack in a door that lets in the POSSIBILITY THAT SOMETHING ELSE EXISTS. That opening is then the crack through which the Holy Spirit will enter and do his work and sometimes a crack in a door is all it takes.

The other day I said to my sister “What would happen if I parked in a Handicap parking spot and then got a ticket?”  She said “Oh that would never happen…forget it about it” and I went on about my business. Literally the next day I pulled into Best Buy and for some completely moronic reason that escapes me now, I parked in a handicapped spot (I had just dropped my sister off a physical therapy….as she had just had knee surgery…so I had her handicapped placard hanging in the car….but regardless of that it was admittedly, a totally moronic thing to do).  When I exited the store, sure enough, there was a cop standing there.  A really pissed off cop…by the way.  I cannot tell you how stupid I acted or the totally banal things I said to this guy….its any wonder that the guy didn’t arrest me on the spot.  I just got flustered I guess and got myself deeper and deeper with each word.  After the whole ordeal was over…..I felt worse than I had the only time I was ever fired from a job.  So I sat in the car for a while and wondered “is it possible that I just made that happen by thinking about it?  Or was this was just a coincidence?  I wonder what a statistician would say the likelihood of THAT event occurring by chance?  I had JUST said that the day before….had my thoughts or words about this very thing made it happen? Despite feeling pretty blue on the outside, I was actually secretly happy to see that I had influenced SOMETHING…..no matter what it was.  At least I had seen the cause and effect of my thoughts.  And now, I thought to myself, I just have to figure out exactly what I did and do the opposite of that.  Instead of making something bad happen could I figure out how to make good things happen?  Is that even possible?

This is a point worth discussing……and quite frankly I’d love to discuss it with YOU.  I’ve been reading a bunch of books lately about this subject starting with the worst one “The Secret”.  It’s not that I didn’t LIKE that book. I DID.  But I went through the same process as everyone else feeling like a total idiot when a new Mercedes  Benz didn’t show up in my driveway after I time contemplating it.  But it kind of left me wondering “so what the heck do I do next?”.  First of all, if I’m going to read a book like that, I’d appreciate it the author would tell me HOW they made their million dollars and HOW they got their new car, or the Man (or Woman) of their dreams, etc.  Quite frankly if I had to guess I’d say that we’ve all been pretty discouraged by the results (or lack there of) of practicing the tenants of “The Secret”.

But rather than just forget the whole idea because of one mediocre book, I decided that it seems like there’s something to this. AND by the way, it appears that other people are talking about this very thing now (have you ever noticed how that happens?  You discover something new and think it’s totally novel, only to discover that half the planet is already buzzing about it!  But I digress!).  Perhaps it’s time for our species to take a step up to the next level of our development and look beyond the Newtonian Physics that we’ve all been taught as young adults….and at least think about the possibility that there may be some way to manipulate or direct our lives to our benefit.  All I can say is that even if there’s one chance in hell that this can be done I think it’s worth trying to figure it out.  (and by the way I am a Christian and I do not think this conflicts with the tenants of Christianity…..Jesus often taught that the words we speak have the power to influence our lives).

OK so to conclude for today, I’ll leave you with a little excerpt from a book I’ve been reading by “The best known life coach in America” (as per USA Today)….Martha Beck (of Oprah fame).  She opens the book (Steering by Starlight: The science and magic of finding your destiny) with this:

“The first guy to go in always carries a shotgun” says Kirk Fowler.  He’s not a big man, for a law enforcer; in fact he’s not much taller than I am.  This is a quality I appreciate in a martial arts instructor.  Kirk is my sensei, and in the middle of a lesson, he’s telling me how he used to serve warrants on suspected drug runners and coyotes  con-artists who take would-be immigrants’ money, then load them into trucks and abandon them in the desert to die.  “These are really violet people,” Kirk says, “and they have an intense fight-or-flight reaction at the first sight of the officers.  They’re usually doing drugs as well as selling them, and that makes them about as violet and unpredictable as humans get.  You’re never in more danger than when you’re walking into a room to serve a warrant.  It’s scary as hell.”

It’s hard to imagine Kirk terrified.  He’s a master of aikido, a martial art that focuses more on inner peace than on physical power.  I’m learning aikido because it works like magic.  Literally.  An aikido master gently touches your head and suddenly you’re on the floor.  You try to slug him and you can barely lift your arm.  These effects feel almost supernatural, but given a few minutes anyone can use them well enough to see that they’re real.  So it isn’t surprising that Kirk’s aikido training was very helpful when he worked for the border patrol.  What is surprising is the way it helped.

“One day when I was serving a warrant,m I decided to try going in with my energy totally calm and relaxed, instead of high adrenaline.  The suspects were in a motel room, wired, scared and well armed.  To reach a place where my energy was calm, I had to imagine that all of them were already dead.  So I went into that room feeling really quiet and respectful, the way you’d feel going to a funeral.  And when i opened the door, no one did anything.  The suspects just looked at me as though they’d invited me to a summer picnic.  they cooperated with the officers through the whole arrest.  Even to me that was weird.  From then on I kept my energy tuned that way whenever we served a warrant.  I still had the shotgun. But I never needed it.  Over and over, people who should have fought or run simply started cooperating.”

OK just FYI as I discover more about this I will share more with you….if you’re interested.  PLEASE if you see my blog, say hello.