Are you living on purpose, or are you living with a hangover? Are you making deliberate choices about your life story, or are you living on autopilot? My blog is all about taking back control in a powerful, peaceful way.

Many of us, including myself at times, have a hangover from our youth. To be our authentic self, to live from the center of our being, is to listen to the voice of our thoughts and get rid of the garbage that may have piled up before we were in the habit of taking out the trash.

If you begin to faithfully examine your thoughts and look for out-of-date messages, you’ll want to take out the trash before it smells. It won’t be an examination of conscience, but of consciousness.

Action Step: Picture a thought balloon. In children’s books, sometimes the words or thoughts of a character are written in a balloon hanging over or right beside the person’s head. What if you picture your own thought balloons as real balloons? Notice that balloons filled with a bunch of hot air, if you let go of their strings, will ascend above your head, higher and higher, until they are swallowed up by the wind and the sky.  Bye-bye! Imagine this frequently and vividly, as need be.

If you want to live on purpose, you must see what thoughts are driving you and determine if the destination they’re taking you to is a place you’d like to go.

Be Aware of the Power Within You.
Through Grace, You Can Live on Purpose.
And It’s Always Raining Grace.

The other day an 83-year-old living in the skilled nursing center where I minister was taunted by junior high school kids. They were kids who had taken up residence in her unkind mind.

By virtue of our noble birth as children of Divinity, we all should be free of put-downs by others (and ourselves.) Who were the humans who created your inner litany of abuse? Perhaps for you, it was the nasty kids in middle school, or the artificial friend who sabotaged you, or the parent who did their best yet was sorely lacking. Those voices probably belong to your past. Only you can give them time travel privileges. Our brain, not always super brainy, can and does bring those bullies’ voices or their ideas to life again.

If we want to reach our full potential for joy and contribute to the world—if we wish for the fulfillment of a truly meaningful life, we must learn to listen to our inner monologue or dialogue. We must be the gatekeeper of our thoughts, or we will be their victim. An unobserved mind will wander through the weeds. Living in an imperfect world, everyone has weeds, unless and until they undertake to prune them out.

Our emotional life will give us a wealth of information about our inner conversations. If we’re in the doldrums, being chased by invisible bears, or tormented by feelings of inferiority, it’s worth a listen to what’s going on in our minds. Does our thinking (usually judging) reflect our highest wisdom in our current stage of life? We might interrupt unworthy thoughts with an update. If we keep our minds well-pruned, we won’t get tangled up in the same old weeds.

Of course, pruning is a big job. Thank God it’s raining grace!

Today, be aware.
God’s Life floods your heart.
It’s always Raining Grace.

Books by Sally

Most of us struggle to be authentic. If we don’t win the battle to be ourselves, our self will never have a chance to be. No one else can take over the privilege and challenge of our self-expression.

I believe the glorious freedom of authenticity lies in realizing our lives are not about us. If we are not the central focus of our lives, the burden of proof—of proving we are worthy—falls off our shoulders. Liberation is ours.

In my youth, I was a people pleaser. The source of the problem was not self-adulation, but a sense of not being good enough to live up to self-imposed ego demands. If others were pleased with me, I felt worthy. Like the chameleon, the people pleaser needs to adapt to the environment, to the surrounding people. They please others at the expense of maintaining the unique identity that is their gift.

People Pleasing Kills Creativity. For an artist, people pleasing is deadly. When I was a pleaser, I couldn’t freely write, pour out my heart, find my voice and let it be heard. To do any of those things was to risk rejection, to have people not pleased with me. Writing this blog entry and posting it would have been impossible.

But I can have the pluck to be me and write freely if I realize I’m just not all that important. Let’s face it, in 60 years I’ll be dead. (I chose that number because old habits die hard. I knew you’d think I was relatively young—which seems to please a lot of people.)

If the point is not to prove myself as a writer, if the point is you, my audience, and what I can contribute to your thought life, or your life in general, if you are my focus, then I’m free. The point is, I am not the point, the be-all, the end-all of writing, or of living. My life is not about me!

As ego diminishes, courage increases. As concern for others becomes larger, my need to be larger than life (larger than I am) becomes smaller.

This insight is nothing new. Long before the internet made it possible to be humiliated instantaneously on the world stage, to be undone in the time it takes to press tweet, post, or send, this idea was floated. Some 2,000 years ago, it was written, “Love casts out fear.” When I reach out to others in love, whether it be on a keyboard or around someone’s dining room table, I am without fear.

Well, maybe not without it. Perhaps just less dominated by it. I’m human, and it’s human to want to be loved. The prayer of St. Francis says it well: “Let me not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love.”

In the final analysis, we’re all “perfectly imperfect.” We do our best. And we’re dependent on the grace of God, which, thank God, rains abundantly.

My prayer for you–today, be aware.
God’s Life floods your heart.
It’s always Raining Grace.