Affirmative Prayer is a choice we have about our mind-set right here and right now. It is normal to have fearful thoughts, especially when faced with challenges. Using Affirmative prayer we can pull ourselves up from those worst case scenarios and invite Spirit into our awareness so that we can be with what is before us and allow a sense of peace to guide us through this moment.
Our Workshop this Sunday after service is about how to cultivate in us empathy, compassion, forgiveness and understanding. To live from an Affirmative Lifestyle is to respond to absolutely every situation and person from a mindset of affirmative prayer, which is the foundation of living a Unity lifestyle.
I recall when I was working as an inhouse chaplain for St Joseph’s Hospital in Kansas during my seminary training. A young father was brought in from a serious car accident along with his wife and two small children. The situation did indeed look frightening and the EMT’s and the medical staff in the ER went into full response mode. I was called to be with the wife and children. We went and sat together in a little side room they have for family members. We held hands and prayed that the “Spirit of God was within her husband and this same Spirit was guiding his medical team to bring about the best outcome. We have faith in Spirit’s “revitalizing power and we see him whole and free.”
I walked out of the room for a moment into the hallway when one of the EMT’s spoke to me about the way I prayed. He said said to me, “You don’t know that will happen.” I said to him, “You don’t know that it won’t.”
If we see prayer as calling on a far-away God that has to be supplicated to come and heal us or a loved one or for some supernatural entity to alter the course of an outcome, we can become very disillusioned with a God who heals some and not others.
Living a lifestyle that is based on Affirmative Prayer centers us in the awareness of Presence, the One Presence and One Power that we call God. Surrendering our frenetic chatter, we naturally connect with Spirit and our Vision gets uplifted into knowing and realizing that the same Spirit that is within us, living us and breathing us is within all creation. Spirit never leaves us, never will leave us. cannot leave us.
I am reminded of my late friend, Ethel’s Kings’ favorite saying, “There is no spot where God is not.” Let this statement be used as an affirmative mantra to lift us above our problems so we can see with higher Vision.
Seeing from Higher Vision is how prayer changes things. It changes the way we see things.
By the way, the father did make it through the surgery and recovered.
Blessings,
Rev Janice
