Chapter Seven: Making Friends with Life

Some people say the whole wide world is sad
   Because their own small thoughts are cross and blue;
And yet you cannot say the road is bad
   Because you have a pebble in your shoe.

    — R. McCann.

ONE of the things that we must learn in the conquest of prosperity is to make friends with life.

"The way to gain a friend is to be one," we are told. The way to make a friend of life is to treat life as a friend. Trust life as you would trust a friend. Go at least halfway in trying to understand and appreciate your environment, your circumstances, your problems, your duties, just as you would go halfway—or more—with a friend.

Do not complain of your circumstances. Do not depreciate and criticize your environment. Do not assume that life has given you "a poor deal." Do not assume that good is withheld from you by some adverse external power.

Suspicion, criticism, and faultfinding can ruin a friendship. They do not promote a friendship between you and life.

How many a seeming enemy is transformed into a friend by understanding! In a school that I attended there was one chap who never seemed to get well acquainted with any of the boys. He seemed stand-offish and aloof, hard to get acquainted

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with. He did not come early, as most of us did, for the good-natured chaffing and sparring that took place on the front steps before assembly. He did not linger with the rest of us after classes. We thought that he was stuck-up, and decided that, if he did not want to be one of us, we would let him alone.

Boys can be quite thorough at that sort of job. We were. We were, that is, until one day he did not show up at school, and one of the fellows read an item in the paper that quite changed things. It was the story of the passing of a mother, who left behind her an only son, a boy who had taken devoted care of her through a long illness. That boy was our stuck-up friend. He had remained home with her each morning until the last possible moment, and hurried home to her right after classes each day.

Boys can do another kind of job quite thoroughly, too; that job is trying to make amends for a mistake. Some of the fellows called on him. He expected to have to leave school. They helped to find a home for him, and a place where he could earn enough to continue in school. He proved to be a "regular" fellow, regular enough not to let us know how much unhappiness our attitude may have caused him.

Friendship is based on something more than mere acquaintance with any one, to be sure. We may grant all a person's good qualities, and yet not happen to have enough things in common with him to form a close and enduring friendship; but

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at least our disinterest or dislike will be tempered by better acquaintance, and with every such acquaintance there is always the alluring possibility that it may lead to one of the greatest of blessings, a real friendship.

The only way really and actively to dislike any one is to refuse to know him. I have a friend who puts up a great show of gruffness and annoyance regarding children. As a matter of fact these mannerisms are his armor against himself. He is very fond of youngsters, and, as he confessed to me at one time, could easily become maudlin in his sentiment regarding them. So he shuts his mind and heart to them. "A fellow cannot go around adopting youngsters all the time," he used to say; and instead he contributes to charities and other childwelfare organizations.

Only by shutting people out of our life can we avoid liking them. Even our seeming enemies will win us, otherwise. Edward Carpenter, noted English author, wrote a booklet during the World War, entitled, "It Must Never Happen Again!", in which he tells of an incident that illustrates the point. In a certain sector of trench warfare the same British and German troops had opposed each other for some months. They became so friendly that at Christmas time they tossed gifts across to each other. It was necessary to transfer them to other positions in order to get them to fight with the proper ferocity. They could not hate their enemies when they knew them.

That does not apply to circumstances, you say?

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You know them only too well? You do not really know them at all if you see in them only adversity and limitation. You know the wrong things about them, as we boys "knew" the wrong things about our schoolmate. There are a thousand opportunities for fascinating discoveries in friendship, happiness, and prosperity everywhere. And if your environment does not seem ideal, the quickest way to transform it or to be free of it is to find the good in it, learn the lesson of that good, and put the stamp of blessing upon the situation.

How can one bless and approve a condition that manifestly is not good? You can bless it for the opportunity that it gives you to find and use a power greater than the evil or imperfection that the condition represents to you.

Make your agreement with your adversary. Somewhere in every condition, every situation, there is an element of good. Evil at most is only undeveloped or misplaced good—"jam on the carpet," as one teacher has expressed it. Make your agreement, not with the evil that appears, but with the good that will appear, and you will thereby help to call the good into expression. There are many negative and destructive processes in life, it is true, but they are inconsequential. They are incidental. They are like the interval of silence between two notes of a melody. They simply serve to emphasize (by helping us to distinguish between) more important things. They are like the spaces between these words. The spaces are incidental to the process of creating

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a book with written characters. A book conceivably could be written without spaces—as indeed in very ancient times books were—but it would be difficult to conceive of a book made up principally of blank spaces with very few words. The emphasis would be all wrong. The only element of constructive value would be the words. If there were no words at all there would be—for all practical purposes—no book.

Life is like that. Always God places the emphasis upon that which is positive, constructive, affirmative. Negative, destructive, prohibitive measures are never emphasized. They are merely "passovers" to more important matters.

We cannot be happy or well or successful if our life is built upon a negative and destructive mental state. We are weak in proportion to the emphasis that we place upon negation.

Once in the writer's metaphysical practice, a woman who was possessed by an overpowering sense of weakness came to him for treatment. She was large and of robust appearance. She possessed the physical substance of a strong body—and yet she was so weak that the slightest physical exertion wearied her. This seemed the more astonishing because of the fact that she had long been a student of metaphysics. The cause of her trouble seemed very obscure, until finally in a burst of confidence she said: "Do you know, there is just one thing in metaphysics that has seemed difficult to me. I have never been able to become clear regarding the idea of the unreality of the body. I

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have denied and denied and denied, and yet I cannot feel right about doing so. If you could help me with that, I think that I should at least feel more at peace, whether I felt stronger or not." The cause of her trouble was so patent that it seemed strange that she herself did not discover it in that remark! She had slipped to the negative phase of mental activity. She had denied in her body the very essence of its strength, and she had demonstrated better than she realized! She had demonstrated weakness!

"Knowledge is power," but it must be the right kind of knowledge. Many people are made wretched by what they know—or suspects—of life. It is bad enough to be ignorant of life, but to know the wrong things about life is worse. The second state is more wretched than the first. There are enough negatives in the world to fill all of a person's thought, if he chooses them as the theme of his thinking; but all of them put together are, as it were, the merest infinitesimal fraction of all that there is to know that is constructive and that consequently makes for happiness and peace in the mind of the knower.

"He didn't know very much, and he'd have been better off without the little that he did know," was the sage comment of one man regarding a friend who had accumulated a lot of negative facts about life. What he knew may have been quite true in itself, but it was so out of proportion that it became false by reason of what it implied.

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Not infrequently a seeker for Truth will fall into this snare of negation. He becomes dissatisfied with old beliefs. He finds many of them of doubtful verity. Consequently he deserts them for fresh fields of exploration. He finds himself in a realm of so-called advanced thinkers and reformers who have mistaken dissension for discovery. As he starts upon the track of errors and negations, these become like a snowball in his mind, rolling up fresh evidence of calamity at every turn. He loses a proper perspective, and sees so much negation that he believes that it possesses the world. Poor misled child of God! The world that is possessed by negation is not the world about him, but the world within him: the world of his own thought! He has started emphasizing in his own mind the up beat of the rhythm of life, and all the world seems out of step to him!

Great minds are positive minds. Men of greatness always believe in the good. Their attitude toward life is aggressively constructive. They do not simply believe in success, but they act upon that belief. They affirm, by what they do, the positive character of what they think. They attest their faith in the good—in success—by acting strongly upon that faith.

Negation sometimes serves a useful purpose in life. It dispels falsity. But negation is not a thing in itself. It is the absence of something. It is a defensive measure, to be used for emergencies only. It is like the rubber eraser on your

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lead pencil. It serves to obliterate mistakes, but it will not take the place of the lead, which is the real working end of the pencil.

Be careful, when by negation or denial you take something out of your life, that you follow it up immediately with positive affirmation. Affirmation is the swing and march and rhythm of life. Do not remain long out of step. For every error that you remove from your life, add ten truths; for Truth is the positive Power. This point is well illustrated by an experience that came to the writer's attention at one time.

A young woman had been brought into court by a social worker. The girl was accused of being a drug addict. She pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a house of detention by the kindly judge, who wanted to help free her from the destructive habit that was ruining her life. When she had been cured, he called her before him, gave her a fatherly talk, and told her that he wished never to see her in his court again.

However, it was only a few months until she was brought before him once more. On her first appearance before him she had been penitent and contrite. Now her attitude was changed. She was defiant, with a kind of desperate intensity that alarmed the benevolent man who had meant to be her benefactor.

He expressed his disappointment at seeing her again in such a state, after he had made it possible for her to be free of the distressful state into which she had fallen. "Why, after all we have

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done for you, have you deliberately resumed the habit from which you were made free."

Her answer was an indictment of the whole theory of negation. "You took out of my life the one thing that was left to me. Taking it away, you also separated me from old haunts, old associates, all that was familiar to me. You took something out of my life, but you put nothing in to take its place!"

Ally yourself with the forces in life that build. It may be necessary to eliminate old structures before more noble mansions can be built, but remember always that that which tears down is only incidental to a nobler purpose and process— that which builds.

God is the great positive mind of the universe. A thousand times ten thousand forms may pass away, but they pass only to make way for better ones. God is undismayed. His purposes do not fail. "The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." "God is not mocked." Nothing is permanent but the good, and even the good must constantly evolve into the better, or it ceases to be good. Ally yourself with God. "Nerve yourself with incessant affirmatives." You may safely trust the good even where you cannot see it. By trusting to it you call it forth. Affirm it, and you are united with it. Declare it, not only by your thought and word of faith, but by continual acts of faith. Thoughts and words of faith are preparatory steps; the act of faith is the final fiat of being. The act of faith calls forth the good.

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When you act upon faith in the good you never act alone. God is with you. He is the real actor. He is the good itself. You rest in His shadow when you act in good faith.

The story of Jacob's wrestling with the angel is a type of human experience common to us all. We wrestle with a hundred problems that are angels in disguise. Our fearful attitude of mind, our suspicions, or our lack of clear-sightedness may make these angels appear to be actual fiends that seek to destroy us. Jacob, wrestling with the angel of the Lord, threw his hip out of joint. We, wrestling with adversities, problems, duties, or difficulties, throw ourselves completely "out of joint" or out of harmony with our world.

To the angel Jacob said, "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." To the angels of the Lord you and I should say the same thing. There is a blessing to be had from every experience. Finding these blessings overcomes resistance, either by their being removed from our life, or else by their being so transformed that we rejoice to have them stay.

One of the most trying "angels" that this writer had to get a blessing from as a young teacher was the problem of speaking before audiences. Entering Truth work from an entirely different field, I had managed theretofore to avoid even the debates and class plays that are a part of most young people's education. I had, as a consequence, a very small voice, which would shrink under the strain of self-consciousness to little

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more than a whisper when speaking before others.

I am unendingly grateful, however, to a teacher who was merciless in his conviction that I not only could learn to speak, but that I should do so or perish in the attempt! As a consequence, there followed, among other forms of preparation, a series of agonizing sessions in which the teacher and his pupil would adjourn from classroom to chapel, a chapel that seemed to youthful eyes to be huge in its proportions, but that has shrunk amazingly in these latter years. The teacher would betake himself to the seat most remote from the platform, would send his pupil upon reluctant feet to the platform, and then would call out, "Now, say something!"

No response.

"Say something!" more sharply.

"What'll I say?" would come back feebly from the platform, and so would begin a session that was little less than torture for pupil—and perhaps for teacher, too, but that eventually served to release old bonds of self-consciousness that were more painful in the loosening than ever they had seemed at their tightest.

It was five years before I got the blessing from that particular angel to the point where my resistance was overcome and, like the man whom Jesus healed, I could open my mouth immediately, with confidence that my tongue (and my ideas) would be loosed and I would speak in a way to praise God. Then when I had come to be grateful for the angel that bound me to my task, and could

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have gained my freedom in other work where I should no longer have to give public lectures, I refused the opportunity! I could not bring myself to give up the work that once had been such a trial to me.

Now, with a schedule that includes many talks each week in addition to other work, all of which I enjoy, that nightmarish time of preparation seems remote. Speaking was one of the hardest things that I have ever had to do, yet it has become one of my greatest joys. When some one, new in the faith, comes to me to discuss some hoped-for demonstration, and asks me if I think that he can succeed, I think of how Spirit has blessed me in working my way through seemingly insuperable obstacles, and I say, "Yes! All things are possible with God!"

All things are indeed possible with God, and possible to us, too, when we are with Him. Often we have prayed, "God, be with me!", when really we should pray, "May I be with God!", for truly He is always with us, and always ready to bring us our good, even when we do not consciously want it, and strive with all our little human might to reject it.

It requires real alertness, and an open, unprejudiced mind, to recognize our good when it comes in some form other than the one that seems best to our human judgment; but we cannot afford to close our mind to any avenue of possibility when we invoke the power of God in our affairs.

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We must remove all barriers of limitation from our thought. We must not think or say of ourselves, our associates, or our affairs that they in any way limit us, or limit our receptivity to the good that the Father has for us. We must think and say instead:

I am a child of God. I am governed by His laws. I am one with His joy, His health, His bounty, and His freedom. All that the Father has for me comes to me speedily, richly, freely. God is my instant, constant, and abundant supply of all good.