choose ( a sermon I gave at a nursing home)

I thought this would be of use. I wrote it originally for MDW when she was down.
Choose


Today is not just the “first day of the rest of your life”, but it is all we really have. Cherish good memories, learn from past mistakes, but find forgiveness for yourself and those who have hurt you. Often our failings had a good heart motive – and so do other people’s. Forgive yourself and others even for those times when the heart attitude was wrong – we all get tired and stressed. We have all hurt and been hurt. Sometimes it is our very flaws which give us our unique beauty. Choose this day to see that in yourself and others.
Today you have the most powerful God-given right, and perhaps the only thing completely within your control – choice. Today, choose to see beauty, choose to see with wonder, joy and mystery as a child. Today choose to smile – it has been shown that by simply choosing to smile, your mood will be elevated. It takes far fewer muscles to smile than to frown and it makes nicer wrinkles. Today, choose to see the character and wisdom in those wrinkles, the smile lines and the friends who put them there. The worry lines show you care. Those stretch marks on your belly are not ugly – they are life-lines, telling the wonderful story of miraculous creation of life within you – a new soul!
Today is the point in time that intersects with eternity. Choose to live in wisdom, seeking grace. This is the moment you have, your time to make your mark, make someone smile, get blessed by blessing someone. Right now, you are more than everything you have experienced, more than the sum of all you have ever chosen. Right now you have the choice to be. You can choose to be more than you think you can. We do not control or even choose what happens to us, but we do choose how we react to what happens to us. Out of the shards of broken dreams, hurts and disappointments, you have gone on. Draw strength from it. You cannot change the reality of that, but choose peace instead of bitterness. Reality is subjective and open to individual perception and interpretation. Choose to make your reality experience enjoyable. Smile – someone loves you, and not for what you do, but for whom you are – flaws and all.
Take time for you because people do love you for who you are. You do not need to do everything everybody wants you to. Choose to go for a walk, put the gloom and hurt aside. Breathe, relax and listen to your heart. Ask God to tell you who He made you to be – and listen. What makes you feel alive? Do that. Turn off the TV and call a friend, write them a letter. Invite someone over for dinner, but do not clean your house. They will feel more comfortable if you do not pretend. Don’t compare your reality with anything else – you cannot perceive what another’s is without being that person. Focus instead on being the best “you”. After all, that is the one thing no one else can do.
Choose right now to not spend a lot of energy wondering “why?”
Do not be controlled by fear. Even when things looked hopeless for you, and there seemed no way, you made it. You will survive whatever happens.
Happiness is not an emotion – it is a state of being. Happiness and joy may be accompanied by pleasant emotions, but it is a choice, not something that just happens to you.
Contentment does not exist in a man’s abundance of possessions.
Pain, suffering and sadness can only magnify joy – how can you know what happiness is unless you have known sadness?

Thanks for sharing!!

Powerful Pariah

You have such a way with words friend ;)

You are a nice person

awesome!!!

Thank you, I felt like you wrote it to me; I just really need to hear this today.