Greetings, dear friends, Lent 2020 is upon us! In Unity and New Thought, we have an acronym that helps us remember our lenten practice each year: "Let's Eliminate Negative Thinking!" If you have a limiting thought or belief about yourself or anyone else, if you're letting your occupation define you, if you are identifying yourself by a diagnosis, if you are allowing what may currently be in your bank account to influence your thoughts and feelings about prosperity, you have the opportunity - today and every day - to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, as Paul wrote... If you are engaged in tumultuous relations with a family member, coworker, or acquaintance, you have the choice to step away from that experience and create a new experience. Here is the key: Deny the power of external stimuli over you and the permanence of conditions. First, there is but One Power and Presence in the Universe, God the Good. Secondly, regarding the conditions of the world, these things shall pass. Even the condition of sin, or as "error thinking," as we also call it, is not permanent. Denial is your spiritual tool for letting go, sweeping away all that does not serve your Highest Good. In letting go, we make room in consciousness for an outpouring of good, positive energy, and live a rich, full life in accordance with Jesus's teachings. From this enlightened state, "there shall be showers of blessings." For as Emilie Cady wrote in Lessons In Truth: This same Nazarene, to whom we always return because to us he is the best-known teacher and demonstrator of Truth, spent nearly three years teaching the people --- the common everyday people like you and me, who wanted, just as we do, food and rent and clothing, money, friends, and love --- to love their enemies and to do good to those who persecuted them, to resist not evil in any way but to give double to anyone who tried to get what belonged to them, to cease from all anxiety regarding the things they needed because "your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things" (Mt. 6:32). Lent is known throughout Christianity as a time of sacrifice, penance, repentance. To repent means, simply, to change one's mind. The term comes from a Hebrew word group that translates as "turn away from." What behaviors, limiting beliefs, error thoughts, emotional burdens, or other self-imposed chains of bondage are you willing to turn away from? Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity, writes: "In Christ it is not difficult to eliminate belief in strife and contention. If petty quarrels, jealousy, uncharitable thoughts come into my life, I overcome them by a quiet but positive denial made in the realization that no error has any power or reality in itself." With Divine Love as our guide, let us affirm this Ash Wednesday: "Forgetting the things that are behind, I realize I am strong, positive, powerful, wise, loving, fearless, free spirit. I am God's perfect child." Many Blessings, Daryn L. Wells "In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, and saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." ~ Matthew 3:1-2
