There are two things that you spend your life on: They are ghosts of the past and your toted-along image of yourself. Therefore, whatever occurs in your life, it is yourself you are dealing with.

It is very hard for you to let go of the past. You are dealing with it all the time, even when you are not remembering and reworking it, because the past is also cast in your image. How you see yourself and the world is past-imaging propelled to the present where it gets locked in, and you really don't see anything as it is but rather as it once was, if, indeed, it ever was that which you thought.

Your mind interprets. It judges. It pulls parts in and pushes parts out. You have been very selective of what you allow in, but once allowed in, you find it difficult to let it go.

What if you are not what you have thought? What if all the conclusions you have drawn are ill-concluded or mis-allied? What if you hold on to old thoughts about yourself and won't let them be shaken?

Accept that you are My favored child, and that battered, battling, disgruntled image of yourself is false and nowhere near the truth of you. You have patterns in your life that need to be broken: Habits of thinking. Habits of seeing. Habits of need. You have distorted yourself.

Often you say you would like to start anew. Often you say, "If only I knew then what I know now!" Wishing is staying in the past too.

Relive your life now. From this moment on, see afresh. Consider that you have just arrived on planet Earth today, and you have been welcomed with fanfare and leis. All on Earth have waited for you to arrive, and they greet you now with smiling faces. They want your life experience to be beautiful. They want you to smile back.

You scoff at this thought, but My words make you think how you have been looking at Earth and life on it. You have been looking at it as a trap. You have looked at it as a crazy, unwelcoming, unloving, dangerous place. How important are your thoughts! How important are they to you and to the world! Change your thoughts and you will change the world. The world is made of your perceptions. You have misperceived the world, and the world has misperceived you. All together you have misconceived the world.

The world is a concept you have made. And each generation has purchased the concept generations before purchased and remade.

Now focus on the strains of good that have always enlivened the Earth. Focus on the beauty. Focus on the sweetness of life. If all thoughts of the cruelty exposed in the world were stopped, cruelty itself would stop.

You are more important than you know. You alone, by your thought, can uplift the world. You have been discouraging it, so why couldn't you uplift it?

Why couldn't you be the beautiful flower that blooms in a cranny? Why cannot your smile be the one that broadens across the horizon of Earth? Why cannot you be the one who raises a sword of light that covers the face of the land? Why cannot you be the igniter of love that travels the world? Why can you not be that which you are?

Only your thinking holds you back. Most assuredly, you need to be a bigger thinker. Embrace the world with your new thinking. Be an upholder of truth and not a disguiser of it.

All the effort you have put into being what you or someone else thought you should be, and all along you needed only to be what you were in the first place!

But you can be it now. Today be My child as I made you. Set forth on a journey of love that others can follow. All you need to know, you already know.

Pay attention how you talk to yourself. How many times do you ask yourself why you did something, or did something the way you did, and then call yourself names? Whatever it might have been that you are annoyed with yourself over, there was something behind it that you were searching for, and it was good.

Remember this, your concern is not to be with how something turned out. It is what you are going for. There is some near or distant good that you are seeking. Keep your eye on what you are seeking. That is the good to be keeping your eye on. Never mind the U-turns you have to make. Never mind the fallacy of mistake. Mind only what you are seeking, for that is your motive, and that is your intention, and that is your destination.

What you are seeking for is meaning in your life. When you despair that there is no meaning, then you look for excuses for your life and distraction from what you see life to be, for you have seen it as eternal turmoil rather than the gift it is.

Please change how you look at things. Do it for Me.