When you feel ache in your heart, did someone else put it there? Do you really think that's possible? Outside events and people influence you, certainly, but must they to the extent they do? Must your life rise and fall according to what someone says to you or what comes in the mail? Must every event in life put a stamp on you, as if you were no more than a package at the post office?

You are a sovereign Being of Light. Your light is laser-like and can cut through anything. Despite what goes on around you, you are light. Keep that knowledge, and how dismayed can you be by an irrelevancy of the world?

You must think you are dependent upon what transpires around you. You must think you play the triangles in an orchestra and have to wait for signals from the conductor before you sound them. All the while, you have fooled yourself, for you are the conductor, and you can make any music you want. Choose the oboe or choose the drums, it's up to you. You are the chooser of how you are affected by circumstances in life. You are the chooser of how much pain or joy you will have. If you cannot accept that, can you accept that you are, even to a small extent, a maker of what you will? You have made joy and you have made pain, and you have gone back and forth, dismissing one after the other.

When you make a choice of joy today, you will have more of it. Life will roll along, and whatever corner you find yourself in, you will find a tidbit of joy, or a barrel of it. Find that which you seek. Make sure you are seeking joy and not woe.

What do you pick out to talk about? Joy or problems? Let problems even be joy. That will put them in their proper place.

You are meant for joy. Joy is your due, but that doesn't mean it's coming to you. It's not for you to complain or stamp your foot when it doesn't. Catch joy as you would a butterfly. Your eyes are the net, and your heart is the branch the butterfly alights on. Once you have caught the butterfly, then you let it go as if joy were bubbles that you blow. Waft joy upon the Earth, and there will be more of it visible.

Replace the complaint department of your mind with a joy department. Make room for a joy department. Shove woe aside. You cannot go to a store to return your life nor exchange it for another. But you can make good use of what you have. There is no better use of your life than joy. Will you remember that?

You are more than a receptor of life. You are an interpreter of it. Translate life into the language of love and joy. Joy is your native language, although you may have forgotten it. Expand your vocabulary now. Focus on joy, and see what even an off-day can be. Consider your work week a vacation, and see what happens.

How can a day be joyful for you unless you admit the possibility?

Today, open your heart and mind to possibility. Call the angels to you by your joy. Angels are more than guardians. They are not so serious. They are joy-givers. Be like your angels. Capture joy, and then let it fly. Be a joy-giver. The message I have just sent to you is to give joy.