Yesterday, I wrote about our new home. Today, I began thinking about how blessed I am to be writing about my new home, while many are losing their homes on the North Shore of Kaua’i due to the recent flooding. I began to think, “How can I be happy when others are suffering.” Of course, I am doing what I can do to help, but how can I rejoice while others are sad and lost?

The answer came, “Your joy doesn’t diminish another person. In fact, it lifts them up.” How? We live in one Mind. We are all experiencing each other’s thoughts, feelings, and what happens to one of us, happens to all of us. How? This one Mind connects us all. It is what we mean when we say “oneness” or “unity” or “we are all one.”

This one Mind is everything. It is unlimited and it is receiving the impress of our thoughts at all times. It is plastic. It is waiting for us to set the mold of our experience. Did these people create the flood, just like I created my new home? The answer is both yes and no. Please read this carefully: We do not create our experiences; we create our place in those experiences and our perceptions of them. Our experiences are merely the road we travel back to ourselves, our highest selves, our inner most selves, which is God.

This is my belief based on my life. Experiences are what they are and they bring to us, through us, whatever we need at the time. Again, we do not create the experience, we live the experience from who and whatever we are in that moment. The more we can recognize our true selves, love ourselves and lift ourselves up in consciousness, the more the experience will become to us what we require in that moment and we will lift ourselves up.

I believe in Cause and Effect in the sense that we are setting the mold in every moment with our thoughts and reactions to what happens in our lives. Things do not happen to us; they happen for us. We’ve set the stage for the perfect experiences to bring us exactly what is required for our growth in that moment. We are never lost. We are only on a journey and everyone is always arriving to a higher and higher state of consciousness.

Every challenge I have and I’ve had many lately, is a gift. For example, I did not create my mother’s recent death, but I did create my experience in that death by my reaction to it. I am growing closer to myself in every moment. I choose to view challenges as opportunities. I choose to know that I am up for every challenge because I face that challenge as the Power and Presence of God, which works through me. I bring God to my challenges, instead of my challenges to God. There is a big difference in this statement, for one says that I am outside of God, and the other says that God is me.

Somewhere it is written that God never gives us more than we can handle. Do you know why? Because, as God, we know exactly what we can handle and what we need in every moment.

As far as the floods are concerned, what I know is that we are all here to support each other in times like these. We are here to remind each other of who we are. We are here to lift the fallen through service and love. A friend once said, that we need big shoulders at times like these. Yes, we do; and we all have those big shoulders because God’s shoulders are always as big as the situation requires. Let us love each other and be of assistance where we can, while never forgetting that we are not victims. We are always victors living life, all of it, to the fullest and best that we can in each moment. We always have whatever it takes.

Love and Aloha,

Rev. Rita