My Miracle Is Imminent

Too many coincidences, which I believe are signs, happened to me this weekend, that I felt compelled to share.

On Saturday I had a rough start to my day. I was under such a heavy cloud of depression that I was struggling to get ready for work. This is not normal for me, as I'm usually pretty happy. Before I left the house, I prayed to God that He not only help me get through this day, but to please rescue me from my current struggles. I asked Him why I had to continue to endure the same petty, unfair treatment that I have been subject to for over a year now. I have smiled, been patient, turned the other cheek, let things roll off, given it up to God--everything I could think of. What else was He expecting me to learn? I said that I understood that this was only temporary and He had something better coming for me. I truly believe that. I just wished that he could give me a break.

On the way to work, I was still in a major funk, so I continued listening to Joel Osteen's book "Breakout". I listened to it before, but started again a few days ago. I knew I would get some positive vibes and change the channel on my thoughts. I was up to the part about how God can speed things up for you.

I know that I am meant to do something great with my life. I have a novel 98% finished, and a memoir started that has potential to be the key to my success. The memoir is called "Skipping Church: Confessions of a Reluctant Believer", and I believe that getting this book out there is the first step on my path to eventually becoming a Life Coach and Inspirational Speaker. It occurred to me that since I had always written fiction, I never really paid attention to articles on publishing non-fiction which is totally different. With fiction, your manuscript has to be complete and perfect before you can even think about sending a query letter to try to get a literary agent. With non-fiction it is all about proposing your idea to see if there is interest in publishing it. I made a mental note to look into that at some point.

Usually I would have procrastinated 'looking into that' for months, years or never. That night I Googled "How to write a non-fiction book proposal". The Google results were all good, the first written by an agent I had heard of, the second by Writer's Digest. I knew I would be able to find everything I needed to know, so I bookmarked the search page to read tomorrow. Before I closed the window, I had scrolled down just enough to see the title of a result that said "Sample Book Proposal". The subtitle said something about submitting to Christian publishers. I opened it and not only did it give concise and specific information about what it should entail and how it should be formatted, but the sample letter was for a Christian book that had a lot of similar themes to mine. (Just to be clear, I will not plagiarize the sample letter. I will just know what specifically should be included, but the info would be my own and about my specific story).

I was LITERALLY given the tools I needed to make it easier for me to take this huge step in determining my future happiness. If I don't take these obvious gifts from God seriously and do something with them, then my life forever sucking is entirely on me. This is how He is helping me to speed up my rewards. He knows I am at my breaking point, but He knows I am ready now to break out. I have been at my breaking point before, but I have not been mentally ready to take the steps to live my purpose. Until now, I also did not believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that my miracle was imminent. I have work to do and it is going to be a lot, but least now I have a road map and a jumping off point.

At this point, I thought this blog was done, but the signs kept coming on Sunday.

First thing in the morning, we caught the Blue Heron swooping in and landing across the pond where it was then totally camouflaged. If we hadn't seen it flying in, we wouldn't have seen it at all. I took this as a sign it was going to be a good day. Any day that we see the heron is already a good day.

On my drive to work, I asked God to use me today and to put the right people in my path. Today I helped a girl to figure out that she needed to read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, because I had gone through similar experiences and it had helped me. When a couple asked where they could find Heaven Is For Real, I walked them right over to it, and then grabbed the copy of Akiane's book so that they could see the painting of whom both she and Colton Burpo believed to be Jesus.

My last customer of the day was looking for the workbook for A Course In Miracles. I wasn't aware of a separate workbook, but we had a copy that had the complete text and workbook. I mentioned that I had not yet started reading it, but I have it, and that just yesterday I had bought a copy for my cousin.  The customer and I were having a great conversation. She had read A Return To Love by Marianne Williamson, and I had read Spirit Junkie by Gabby Bernstein, which both explain the teachings of A Course In Miracles, and we convinced each other to read the one the other had not.

As a side note, It is amazing how many customers happen to cross my path who are looking for something that I know I am probably the only person in the building that has read it or even heard of it. From Inspirational authors like Gabrielle Bernstein and Joel Osteen, to life changing fiction like The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. At least four times in the year and a half that I have worked in a bookstore, I have been approached by a customer looking for books by Abraham Hicks. If they had happened upon almost any other employee, they would have looked it up, found nothing, and the customer would have left empty handed. But I ask, "Are you looking for Law of Attraction books on the teachings of Abraham by Esther and Jerry Hicks?" The answer is always yes.

I came home from work to find that my husband had started reading The Bible. He said to me, "You had another book over there that I was going to read if I couldn't find my Bible...something about Miracles". I said "You'll have to narrow that down for me. With my books that could be anything". He looked over my shoulder at the bookcase and pointed it out. I put my hand on the book he was referring to and said "Seriously? This book? This is the book I was literally just telling you about twenty minutes ago. The book I bought for Nancy. The book that was the reason I was late coming home from work because I had a customer looking for the workbook to go with it. The book that basically launched Gabby Bernstein's career." Oh. My. GOD.  On my way home from work I had been thinking that in January I would start reading it, but evidently I am not meant to wait. This will be my next book to read.

Books Are Falling Off The Shelves

It is time to stop playing Candy Crush and get a book (or three) written.

It's time. I need to do it now or it may never happen. I am a month shy of my 45th birthday, and it is affecting me worse than my 40th did, because I have been beating myself up about where I have landed at this point in my life, and how this was not where I wanted to be. Not everything sucks--great husband, great dog, I am healthy, I have a job I am finally happy with--but in just about every other aspect, I have hit rock bottom. There is nowhere to go but up.

The problem is, I am not going up unless I get up off my butt and do what I was put here to do.

I have used every excuse not to write: I don't have a computer; I have a computer but it is inconvenient and uncomfortable; I work 60 hours per week and can't justify going in the other room to write when I could be spending time with my husband; I have a laptop but also have a lap dog, who will win the spot on my lap every time; I have to put so much energy into my paying job that I have nothing left at the end of the day to do anything creative. The list went on and on. I was waiting for ideal conditions to work on my writing, but that day is never going to come.

At least now I am in a job that I love and I only work 40 hours per week, so there is more left over for my passion. I am also not looking at getting published as a way to be rescued from a job I hate. A) That is not even a possibility anymore since publishing has changed so much in the past ten years that a first time writer is not getting that huge book deal that will allow the quitting of the day job, and B) I don't hate my day job, so I can happily continue working while getting my writing career off the ground.

There is a book that I am feeling compelled to write, and I am now writing with a purpose to get my story out there. I believe that it is my contrbution to the spiritual awakening that is happening in the world. It truly feels like it is my purpose, and it is very topical. If I procrastinate much more, I will miss the boat. Every which way I turn, there is something nudging me to just write it!

This past Sunday was the first in a while where I was home to watch Super Soul Sunday on OWN. I always record it, but then it could take weeks to actually find time to watch. Today when I saw that Gabrielle Bernstein (@GabbyBernstein,author of Spirit Junkie and May Cause Miracles) was going to be on, I was psyched because I love her! She was on with two other spiritual teachers for a new generation, whom I hadn't yet heard of, Marie Forleo (@marieforleo,founder of MarieTV), and Mastin Kipp (@TheDailyLove, founder of TheDailyLove.com). I have often remarked that I procrastinated finishing my book because I was not only afraid of failure, but afraid of success. At one pont, Mastin quoted Joseph Campbell, "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek". I remember thinking, "Oh, that's who Joseph Campbell is?" I had heard his name before, but knew nothing else about him.

Gabrielle said that when she went to the bookstore to buy A Course In Miracles, the text on which her teachings are based, she literally felt the energy of the book pulling her to the cash register. One thing that she said really stuck with me: "Once we become willing to know more, books fall off the shelf*...don't act like nothing happened when the book falls off the shelf." In other words, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Often times for us seekers, those teachers come in the form of books. Evidently, books can also fall off the shelf electronically.

I was updating my blog, and added some of my favorite authors' blogs to my blogroll. One of these authors was Claire Cook (@ClaireCookWrite). I briefly met Claire years ago when she spoke at a writer's workshop in Hartford, CT. She was at a fabulous point in her writing career--the point where she was saying to every person she came across, "Guess what? My book is being made into a movie with Diane Lane and John Cusack!" I will never forget her talking about that, because she was so elated and I wanted that to be me someday.

I admit that I have been lazy about reading even my favorite blogs lately--a lapse I plan to rectify--so it had been a while since I had checked out her blog. She has just released a book about not giving up on your dreams, called Never Too Late, and if you signed up for her newsletter, you could download the workbook for free. So I did. And that's when I saw this:

"Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before." ~ Joseph Campbell

This quote had a page all its own in the "Never Too Late Workbook". This quote by JOSEPH CAMPBELL.

It took about 30 seconds for me to download the book.

(Well, to be fair, a sample of the book because I don't have 4.99 to spend on it until Friday, but I am chomping at the bit to read the rest.)

There is no way for me to paraphrase what she wrote on page 14 and still convey how much this was the same thing I was going through, so I quote:

"...right at that moment it hit me with the force of a poolside tidal wave that I was the one who needed to get a life. A new one, the one I'd meant to have all along. I was not getting any younger, and I was in serious danger of living out my days without ever once going for it. Without even trying to achieve my life-long dream of writing a novel. Suddenly, not writing a book became more painful than pushing past all that fear and procastination and actually writing it."
Then at the end of that chapter:

"Not many days go by that I don't take a deep breath and remind myself that this is the career I almost didn't have."

I don't want this to be the career I didn't have because I have been waiting for my books to get magically written, or because I gave up on the dream altogether. These options aren't acceptable to me at this time in my life.

A few years ago, we were watching The Today Show and Jillian Michaels was on promoting her book. A bit later in the show, Ice-T was on promoting his book. My husband said, "Geez, who doesn't have a book out? Oh yeah...you." That opened my eyes. Halfway. I still felt like I had time left to accomplish my dream so I still lacked the necessary urgency. Both of my eyes are wide open now. No more excuses. I don't want to die before I even try.

Claire's story about almost missing out on the life she was meant to have was just the push I needed. I have said before that I was ready to take my writing seriously, but even though I wanted to, it never happened. This is different, a switch got flipped in my brain. I mean it this time. I am putting the effort in, I am doing this.





* Since I work at Barnes & Noble, not every book that literally falls off the shelf is a message for me, but some of them are. More often I help the right books fall into people's hands. For example, twice in the last two months a customer approached me asking for books by Abraham Hicks. With the exception of one other bookseller, anyone else would have searched for books by Abraham Hicks and concluded that we do not carry any books by him, leaving the customer book-less. What both customers were looking for were books on the law of attraction and the teachings of Abraham, by Esther and Jerry Hicks.