Enthusiasm is our passport to our inner search. It keeps us steadfast during those “I don’t feel like it” moments. We can’t be half-hearted about enlightenment – meditating, praying, visioning sevens days in a row and stopping for another month. When we are sincerely enthusiastic, whether our day’s meditation flowered into blossoms of bliss or our mind chatter overwhelmed us, we remain steadfastly unconditional in our practice.

The Spirit of life has invested its allness in you with the utmost love and trust. We exist to multiply this investment and reap the highest dividends of being a spiritual being having a human incarnation. Our Creator Source knows nothing about subtraction or division. It knows only multiplication. Check the facts yourself: Observing nature we can see how its multiplication tables are infinite, and now technology enables us to see cosmic creation beyond the horizon of our own planet – and this is just the beginning!

Would it surprise you to learn that optimism is not a synonym for positivity, nor an opposite of negativity?  Optimism transcends both.  The etymology of optimism is from the Latin, optimum, meaning that the present moment is in an optimum state.  Being optimistic ultimately means that an individual expects the best possible outcome from any situation. Such a person's mindset and heart-set responds to whatever arises in the moment—uplifting or challenging—knowing that within it is a grace, an opportunity for their soul's evolutionary progress.  Have you caught it yet?

In the Bible the word “father” appears 1,484 times. As a father filling what is considered the world’s “most powerful position,” President Obama’s statement that being a father to Sasha and Malia is the most important job he has underscores the profound, sacred responsibility and loving heart-set of fathering.

Spiritual fathering goes beyond its biological definition to include those who provide, protect, coach, teach, mentor, inspire through example—to name a few. Perhaps no one said it more perfectly as did Jesus in John 15:9: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” I invite all those in the role of fathering to contemplate his words.

Those who have a deep spiritual practice can’t help counting all the contents of life as a blessing. Sometimes a particular appearance in our body of affairs seems to contradict any semblance to being our ‘highest destiny’ – at least by our personal sense of ego. We want to push the experience away and feel for it anything but gratitude. We want to escape our present moment experience so we go shopping, turn on the TV, call a friend – anything to avoid the unpleasant. Life as a teacher can sometimes be sharp, uncomfortable, awkwardly embarrassing to the ego’s concept of itself. Life is equally tender, encouraging, unconditionally loving, and exhibits a great sense of humor.