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A Heaven on Earth
John E. Wade II

What Is Your Life Telling You?
Helaine Iris

When We Believe
tom walsh

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"I will try to love and help create a heaven on earth"--the most important sentence that I have written or may ever write.

Many people already try to live by these simple, yet powerful, words without articulating this explicit promise.  I believe that if we--one by one, million by million, billion by billion--would all accept this challenge, the world would progress immensely.  Think about the words and use them to motivate yourself to reach out to love and help others.

How did the pledge come into being?  The groundwork was laid by years of psychoanalysis and follow-up analysis, faithful attendance at Sunday school and church, much prayer and thought, as well as many varied life experiences.

The world may never really know me, or if it does I may someday be forgotten, as most of us are.  But I believe those words and the concept behind them will live on.

"I will try to love and help create a heaven on earth."  Think about it.

Such an explicit, personal goal as this can drive humankind forward on a wonderful journey.  I want my life to count.  Dr. Milburn Calhoun, the publisher of this book, told me that he wants his life to count, too.  You want your life to count, don't you?

Our very wise founding fathers made a serious pact in the form of our Declaration of Independence.  That famous document includes a reference to the pursuit of happiness.

Such a concept is an attractive and desirable one, but I believe it can be carried too far if one lives a hedonistic life.  I once did.  Instead of seeking only pleasure, we should, in many facets of our lives, delay gratification and seek to become part of a loving cause greater than ourselves.

The pledge is an invitation to join such a cause, either explicitly or implicitly, to help further this goal of guiding humankind toward a heaven on earth. . . . I deeply believe that since the dawn of humankind each of us and all of us have a little piece of God within us that goes beyond our human knowledge and imagination.  Expressed another way, there's a hero inside each of us and all of us.  We are made up of mind, body, and spirit, with spirit being another way of identifying that little piece of God.  Our knowledge, imagination, and our little piece of God combined with God's support will carry us to a heaven on earth.

I believe that God has always intended that humankind achieve a heaven on earth, with the necessary help of his enduring, steadfast love.  All the great religions of the world teach the Golden Rule, to "Do unto others as we would have them do unto us."  Let's build on that.

The ten elements that I believe are essential to our achieving a heaven on earth are:

1.  Peace
2.  Security
3.  Freedom
4.  Democracies
5.  Prosperity
6.  Spiritual Harmony
7.  Racial Harmony
8.  Ecological Harmony
9.  Health
10.  Moral Purpose and Meaning (doing the right thing with regard to word and deed). . . .

I believe the above ten elements and the individual paths to a heaven on earth apply to each one of us as well as all of humankind.  [We must give] serious thinking about how humankind can do our part to achieve a heaven on earth.  If we don't have a worthwhile and definite destination in mind, it is highly questionable that we will ever be able to reach it.

Humankind must reach out for our ultimate destiny.  Each of us and all of us must pledge, "I will try to love and help create a heaven on earth."  We must also seek to implement the ten elements for all of humankind.  A heaven on earth.  I invite you to think about it, imagine it, dream about it, pray about it, and ultimately do something to bring it about.
  

Emily is a consultant who works in the education system, but she's also single and very much wants to be in a long-term relationship.  When immersed in her work with others, all she seems to notice is how happy and successfully married her coworkers are.  Then she feels jealous, and begins to question her life, as if she's "missed the boat."

When she was describing her experience to me and musing about how painfully distracting it was, she asked me, "What do you think the universe is trying to tell me?"

I then proceeded to take a very deep breath and respond.  I said, "The universe. . . well, not exactly.  I think it's your life."  Then I told her that while it might make it easier to blame her confused feelings on a booming message from the universe, I thought it was her life speaking to her.

I firmly believe every day, your life does speak to you, sometimes in quiet ways, and sometimes like a 2 X 4 on the head.  In Emily's case, I think some older part of her wants permission to abandon her audacious dream of an international career and focus instead on finding the relationship that her childhood, and culture taught her would be her ultimate fulfillment.  Poised on the brink of success, understandably Emily is scared.

Learning to listen to your life offers you the gift of valuable feedback from a very reliable source:  YOU!  The art of life is to discern what the information means and what to do with it.  The opportunity for Emily is to examine her fears, her old beliefs and what's getting in her way--not to get caught up believing one choice over the other, marriage over career, or career over marriage is the answer.

Ultimately, Emily has to find her own answers about what her life is telling her, as do we all.  I believe being courageous enough to ask the question creates the foundation we need in our lives to be successful on all levels.  So, what is your life telling you?

It's YOUR life. . . imagine the possibilities!

* * * * * *

Helaine is a Life and Business Coach, who has been featured in numerous publications, including "O" The Oprah Magazine.  She helps entrepreneurs and professionals accelerate their professional success, while achieving a more complete and fulfilling personal life.  She combines a broad range of professional experience in her work, including management positions in the education, training, retail and international non-profit sectors.  She loves her life and awakens each day excited to make the world a better place, one person at a time.  Visit her at http://www.pathofpurpose.com.

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Lay Waste
No Power
by
Tom Walsh

Brand new from Living Life Fully Publications!
   
How have you used your power and energy today? If you're like most people, you've put a lot of effort into your day's tasks, doing your best to accomplish all that you can as well as you can. But have you been aware of the ways that you're expending your energy? Over 150 years ago, Wordsworth wrote the line, "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." This line—as well as an experience with a counselor many years ago—has inspired me to examine the concept of how we use our power in positive and negative ways, with the end goal of helping people to be aware of the ways they use their power.

When We Believe

I've always been perplexed by the concept of belief.  I think that in some ways, that's a result of constantly seeing the word "believe" in a religious context, which really isn't all that accurate a connection, based on the many people I know who are strongly religious.  To them, it's enough to say that they believe in this or that, but what they say they believe in doesn't convert to a true "belief" that's a complete part of who they are, and that helps to determine how things go in their lives.  After all, if most people's faith were converted into true belief, then many more people's lives would be filled with love and passion and positive outcomes and incidents.

I see the power of belief constantly as a teacher--the students in my classes have a huge range of beliefs about themselves and their abilities.  Some of them believe that they can do anything that's asked of them, and guess what?  They do.  They have varying degrees of success, of course, but they are able to handle any task I throw their way.  Other students, though, have been beaten down and discouraged all through their academic careers, and that fact has instilled in them a belief system that tells them that they can't do certain things, and that they never will be able to do so adequately.  I don't need to tell you that these students have a much harder time trying to accomplish the tasks in the classroom.

Some students believe that English or Math are boring, and their beliefs make that so, no matter what teachers do to bring creative and unique lessons to the classroom.  A student who believes that English is important but that Social Studies isn't will have completely different experiences in the two classes.  These are facts, and when a student finds a change occurring in their perspectives on a class or a subject, it usually isn't because a teacher is changing his or her "mind," but because a teacher is changing that student's beliefs about a class or a subject.

Most of the students that come to high school English classes believe that English is hard or boring and completely irrelevant to their lives.  To them, reading is hard or their writing has been graded and found to be inadequate, so they generalize those results to the entire field of English.  When they come into my class, I don't try to convince them that English is fun or interesting--I work on trying to help them to develop a new belief system about English.  I work to try to help them to see the relevance of reading in their lives, when they can learn important life lessons from the stories and essays that they read.  I work to try to help them to believe that they can write, even if they may not be able to write as well as some others.  And I find that when the students change their beliefs, I finally see the results of those beliefs in the work that they do.

I'm very patient with the students as I try to help them change their beliefs for one reason:  in my life, it seems to take me forever to change my own beliefs.  I have some beliefs that are so deeply ingrained that it seems that I was born with them, and I work constantly to shift those beliefs to more positive ones, but it definitely doesn't happen overnight.  So I know that while the high school kids that I work with have the advantage of youth and a bit more resiliency, I also know that they haven't yet experienced the results that a change in belief can bring, so they don't see the need to change anything.  Nor do they usually even recognize the fact that they do have beliefs that are holding them back.  So I have to be patient, or I would give up before I reached any sort of success.

"Belief" in a religious sense is usually a misnomer.  The words "I believe in God," while supposedly making a claim that is important, really don't mean much of anything at all.  If we say "I believe in the goodness of God," then we start to express a true belief in something that is very important to us, and that can have a positive effect on our lives.  We can believe in ourselves as architects or salespeople and end up doing great work because of that belief, while at the same time having a lack of belief in our own inherent worth as people and failing in relationship after relationship because of that lack of belief in our own worthiness.

Carol Sheffield said, "As our beliefs actually change, so do our experiences," and I know that she was right.  While it's tempting to think that we can "take control" of our lives and change what happens to us and how those things happen, the truth is that until we're able to change our beliefs about ourselves and our places in this world, our lives won't change at all.  Whenever we find ourselves in trouble or in difficult situations, it's important that we examine our beliefs about that situation if we truly want to work our ways through it in positive and fulfilling ways.

(Our page on beliefs is available here.)

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