Life is not a card game

Prayer better than luck!

A friend in the interior design field believes in prayer rather than luck. Life is not a card game, he would agree. He is usually grinning from ear to ear with some amazing story about how a client needed a certain product that was no longer produced, or unavailable, or some other hopeless sounding theme.

My friend prays to know how God’s love fits into the service he is providing his client. If the answer is to proceed with the unavailable product, he starts making phone calls, and always finds, often in unexpected ways, exactly the amount needed for the job.

This happens not once or twice, but often enough that he sees a law of eternal good operating – not for a special person, or a special business. But a Life-law of good already in place, already active for all of humanity. My friend taps into that law when he prays to be a blessing for his clients and his community. Then he hears the ideas he needs to go forward with the projects he feels God has given him to do.

My friend loves to be of service, making people’s lives more beautiful, more harmonious, more joyful. His life embraces the spirit of Anne Hawks’ simple prayer-poem, comtemporarily reworded:

I need You every hour;
Teach me Your will;
And Your rich promise, Lord,
In me fulfill.

Good luck - where does it come from?

It's true, I’m a little bit behind. The latest and final story in the Harry Potter series hits the bookstores in July, and I realized I hadn’t read the Half-Blood Prince yet -- the previous installment.

The Harry Potter books chronicle a young person’s involvement in the good vs. evil battle. From Harry’s "Potions" class comes our topic for today-- the good luck potion. If someone drinks just a little, everything will go exactly right for them for several hours. It turns out in practice that what the brew does is allow Harry to listen to his intuitions and follow them with confidence. As I see it, the effect of the potion had less to do with luck, and more to do with listening and following.

For me, luck has little to do with life. Life is about making decisions, preferably good ones. Which brings us to the incredible ability God has given each of us to listen to and trust our own intuitions. What if we define intuitions as angel thoughts from God, coming to us with good ideas?

Then how do we know if an idea is an intuition from God, or just a random thought running through our heads? For me it helps if I’ve asked God for an answer to something (big or little), then the intuitive answer has a clear relationship with the question. And I’ve found that usually intuitions can be identified because they are unselfish, generous, may require a change of plans, or just seem like the right thing to do, even if not convenient.

Like the hero of the kids’ series, we need to listen to our intuitions, and trust them in order to follow them confidently.

Angels. God's thoughts passing to man;

spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect;
the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality,
counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality.

Mary Baker Eddy

See also: Angels according to kids

Good happens immeasurably!

Do things happen in threes?

In Clint Eastwood’s recent excellent film, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” a young Japanese soldier tells his commander that the commander has twice saved his life. The commander smiles and remarks that things happen in threes. And he soon saves the boy’s life again. The young soldier is one of the few Japanese survivors of Iwo Jima.

While this makes fine drama, I’m not all that happy with the premise of things happening in threes. For one thing, it’s superstitious and carelessly submits to a capricious fate. For another, it’s not at all pleasant to contemplate when the “things” that might happen are bad things. One keeps waiting for, even expecting, the third bad thing.

As to good things happening in threes, well I've thought about that too. I believe with all my being that God, that higher power who created the universe, is wholly good. And that He expresses Himself/Herself in goodness, intelligence, and beauty. And that ceaseless outpouring of the divine nature in our human experience is not limited to tidy little clusters of three good things here, or three good happenings there. Three is too tiny when we’re talking about universal good.

Since Easter is this Sunday, it might be worthwhile to think about three in another context – Jesus’ three days in the tomb. At the end of those three days, his biographies say, an angel rolled away the stone and sat on it. Don’t you love it? Sat on it. “So much for you, big, tough, rock. You cannot bury Christ in a cave.” So Jesus walked out. What was he doing in that cave for three days? Recommitting to Life? Re-forgiving his enemies? Recommitting to strengthening his badly shaken disciples?

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“Jesus' three days' work in the sepulchre
set the seal of eternity on time. He proved Life to be deathless
and Love to be the master of hate.”
Mary Baker Eddy
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So maybe it's OK to ask, what could I accomplish in three spiritually focused days? Long silence.

The best I know how to do right now, is one day at a time. And to seek out the good in each day, and participate in it, with as much attention to seeing things through God's loving eyes, as I know how. And to value the good in each day, and thank the Creator for it.