"You Are On The Right Path"

In my book, What You Speak Is Seeking You, a book on prosperity consciousness, I write about a woman I met who worked as a receptionist for a temp agency. It was on a day when I had felt incredibly down about finding work and I prayed and wrote in my journal that morning, 'God, please show me I am on the right path.' When I arrived at the temp agency, the receptionist acted like she knew me and put me in front of a manual typewriter without a ribbon in it. It struck me as very strange but the woman acted like it was completely normal so I said nothing. I put a piece of paper in the typewriter and started to type. The click-clack-clack of the keys sounded - like my life felt at that point - entirely futile. I was practically in tears when the woman returned and leaned her head inside the door. 'Stop typing. They' - and she gestured to the heavens - ' want me to tell you something." I looked at her in stunned disbelief.

"You are on the right path," she said, then walked back to the front desk.

I sat there for a moment speechless before leaping off my chair and asking her who 'they' was and why she had said that to me. She smiled knowingly and said "I just heard it."

We met at a little diner for lunch a few weeks later. She told me she had had a heart attack a number of years before and had ended up at Cedar Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. She said she had 'died' and as the doctors and nurses were working on her to bring her back to life, her spirit rose up above her body, hovering and moving about the room. She says that as she 'came back' and was moved to intensive care, three angels appeared at the foot of her bed. The angels showered her with so much love. She was mesmerized by their Light and their Love. No love, she said, in the human world is like this love. All three angels had one large wing - not the two wings as is often depicted in illustrations, but one wing. One of the angels had a big book open in front of him. She says the angel read from the book and as he read, her entire life came to her in fast-moving moments, like little cinematic flashes, one after the other after the other. She said that the angel - not a he or a she but more androgynous - told her she had had a good life and that she had done well but that she had done something all humans do. She had worried too much. The angel with the book told her that it wasn't her time to go -- and that she would have to come back. She resisted this news she said. She told him she wanted to go - that she had never felt so loved or so ready to leave the planet. The angel with the book told her, 'You are going back and your job is to tell everyone you meet - Don't Worry. You must teach them this. It accomplishes nothing. It is man's greatest sin.

She paused and I waited. I was sure there was more. Books more. Was that all he told her, I asked. She smiled. Her smile conveyed volumes to me. She had asked them the same question. They had given her the same smile. And the smile delivered the same message: Trust.

I asked her how she had known to tell me 'You are on the right path'. She said that ever since her near-death experience she had become far more sensitive and psychic, more open to the other realms. She said, she heard a voice -- like a telepathic transmission - instruct her to speak those words in exactly that precise way.

Still, one thing about her meeting perplexed me. I didn't think to ask her at the time but I had wished I had. I didn't understand why the angels had called 'worry' man's greatest sin.

A few months ago, a new teacher of mine told me that the word 'sin' was an archery term for 'missing the mark'. Missing the mark was the definition of sin!! You mean that was all a 'sin' was -- just being off target! All those years of my Catholic upbringing and visions of a million lashes for sins real and imagined dissolved in a holy instant! I wanted to laugh! Whoo-hoo....I really could stop worrying!!

Worry did miss the mark -- always, 100% of the time! Worry was a distraction, a distraction of the ego -- an energetic force that kept you from hitting the target, that led you into procrastination, self-judgment and a wasting of your energy, your vital creative energy. Rather than focusing it in worthwhile and supportive ways, you drained it into inaction, fear, competition, separation, and distraction by worrying. Wow. Wow. Wow. So if worry was missing the mark, then having certainty, trust, peace, and joy, believing in a meaningful universe, in the support and oneness of all things, and in Divine timing was hitting the mark!

Just like receiving information from my teacher at a perfect time when I could hear it was a gift, meeting that woman on that day when I had prayed and prayed to be shown I was on the right path was a gift. It was a gift I have never forgotten - a gift that set me on a path of renewing my belief in the truth that we are guided and never alone, that everything has purpose, everything happens for a reason, everything is a sign, everything in the universe loves us, and is waiting to deliver us a message if only we would ask. As I have been told, you must ask - and sometimes with deep passionate welling up cries from the soul in your car driving down the road - for support from the heavens for angels to intervene. And even when things look bleak, hopeless - even when you are placed in front of a typewriter without a ribbon and told to 'type'and feel like a hopeless fool, there is a beautiful reason for it. Nothing is ever futile. Nothing. Not even worry. Because like the woman I met, sometimes worry is divine - inspiring the opening, the chance to exchange worry for trust in the most incredible of ways. And when you take that chance, you could say quite honestly, it is worry that got you to trust. Nothing futile, child, nothing futile ever.