First in Your Heart

God said:

Pre-set yourself for the good in life. You must do this because, heretofore, you have too often pre-set yourself to dismay or some kind of anguish. You have been on the lookout for danger. As if you find yourself alone in a jungle amidst wild animals, you have been on the hunt for what you fear. You've kept an eye out for it. You have been fraught with the possibility of pitfalls.

It is almost as if you wake up in the morning and greet yourself with the cant: "What dismal thing is life going to bring me today? What trouble is going to come? What annoyances? What bad news? What heartache? What headache? Oh, why do I have to get up?"

You do get up. Congratulations. You may put your shoulders straight and tighten your tie and slick your hair, but on the inside, you gird yourself for battle — or boredom — as if those are the only two choices available to you. "Another day," you say, and your heart sinks.

But today dress your heart for an engagement of love. Set it for expectancy of joy. Enough of dread and foreboding. They are not your friends. Joy is.

What do you want life to bring you today? Set your brainwaves up for it. Change this dreary configuration of your mind. Teach it something else. Teach it what looking forward means, and how important anticipatory thoughts are. Life is not required to bring you what you want. What life requires is that you have a favorable outlook on it.

Even if you have met disaster every day of your life, today you can call joy to you. Call it, and it will come. And if, somehow it does not, at the very least you enjoyed your day more looking for it.

Look for joy the way you have hunted wild animals. Stalk joy. Let it stalk you. Be brazen about it. Tell yourself different stories.

There is more unabashed love in the world than anything else. Despite all the lists you can recount, love is more frequent, and love is more abundant, and love is deeper, and love is much more powerful. Do not get caught up in the angst of the world or the past or fears of the future.

In this moment, there is great love. Listen for it.

Consider that the universe is going to say Yes to you today. And you are going to say Yes to it. Yes, you are here. And love is here. And life is here. And all you could ever want is here. Now, lay claim to it. Let the gold of the love you claim register in your mind. Love and joy are yours now, and you have ample. You have laid claim to them. Therefore, they are yours. They belong to you. Love belongs to you. You cannot rid yourself of it. You can only remove thoughts of it from your mind, and this is what you have been doing.

Today strip yourself bare of all the thoughts that are not of love. Dismiss them. They do not serve you or the world or anyone or anything. They serve you not. You must believe they do something good for you, or you would not hold them. Disband this army of thought that has made you weary and leery of life.

You cannot second-guess life. You cannot make this and that happen. But you can make a nest for love in your heart. Your heart can be a precursor for all the love in the world to take its rightful place. First, in your heart that I have claimed as My Own.