What Spirit Sees Is the Intention, Not the Deed
When people ask me who I am, I point them back to something they've forgotten. There's a small, hidden child tucked inside your chest, and it's crying to be noticed. It wants to be loved. My work is reconnecting people with that child, because that child is the best thing any of us carry. Reach it, and there's nothing you can't do.
Let me give you an example of how this works. I know a man who brings in more than a million dollars every single day, and he puts that money toward helping people in remarkable ways. He has an employee who thinks exactly the same way. Hand that employee the same fortune and he'd do the identical good with it. So which of them does God value more? Neither above the other. They're loved equally, because a thought is a living thing.
Spirit never looks at the act itself. Not once. What gets weighed is the intention sitting behind it. So ask yourself truthfully what yours is. Are you chasing big visible accomplishments so you'll be applauded, so you can turn into somebody? Or are you content doing small quiet things each day?
My father made it his daily business to get someone to laugh, and he pulled it off every time. He kept doing it from a hospital bed while he was dying. I've borrowed the habit. My own aim is to get at least one person to smile each day, and I'd say my record is decent.
People should understand that the world around us is an enormous illusion. We move through the illusion we've built ourselves, then straight into illusions other people have built. You know what it reminds me of, Erik? Flipping from MSNBC to Fox and back again. Two totally opposed versions of reality, with everyone shouting and worked up, and not one of them actually knowing a thing. It's all interpretation. They've got no facts laid out in front of them. They can't tell you what really happened, yet somehow every last one of them is an authority.
Think about it. The same voices who promised us that stripping Wall Street of its rules would make the economy roar, that loosening up home loans was the ticket, those exact voices are sitting in the same chairs on the same programs repeating it. Don't regulate the banks. Leave Wall Street alone. They're pushing the very thing that knocked us flat, and people keep handing over their money for it. Opinion, nothing more.
What another person thinks about you is truly not your concern. What you think about their opinion of you, though, that deserves your full attention. That's the way Spirit reads it.