KS&L 387 Why Did My Cell Phone Shatter Part 1 by Tina Erwin

         My kids think I’m really hard on phones.  They think electrically, I burn up the energy in phones. Who knows? Apparently, I’m hard on cell phones too. So when I went to upgrade my iPhone to the iPhone 4, I made sure I bought an Otter Box to encase it. I dropped my last phone and shattered the screen. It was so weird, one minute it was in my hand and the next it lay shattered on the ground. It still worked, but it was quite shattered. I still don’t understand how or why that happened. With my new phone, I was now smugly confident: I had an Otter box!

         Well, I hadn’t had my new iphone 4 even six months when I was standing in my office holding it when somehow it was no longer in my hand and was now on the tile floor of my office profoundly shattered. The last phone was only cracked, this one was so broken it looked like the glass was pulverized – but it still worked.

         I’m a somewhat spiritual person, but I was so angry! How could this happen to me twice? I allowed those moments of incredulity: that it happened twice and the second time the darn phone was in an Otter Box, the Cadillac of phone protectors – which didn’t work. So after I cooled down, had shaken my head, blown off steam to my sister and my friends, I began to wonder why did this happen to me? Why now?

         Finally, I made an appointment with the Apple Store in Fashion Valley here in San Diego to have the screen repaired. I met my friend Laura there for lunch because she had broken something on her iphone and needed her appointment at the Apple store too. We got to the crowded Apple store early, so we decided to wander through a high-end handbag/clothing store somewhat across from the Apple Store to kill some time.

         The ladies in the store were really kind, helpful and pleasant. As we were about to leave the store I decided to share one of the book cards for one of my newest books: Ghost Stories from the Ghosts’ Point of View, Book One. It’s a gorgeous book card. When I handed the card to the tall blond woman who had so kindly helped us, she looked at me and seemed incredulous. She called her fellow employee over and showed her the card, so I got out another one. This woman’s eyes got big and she looked at Laura and I and told us that her store is haunted! Really? This upscale handbag store is haunted?  Laura and I looked at each other silently thinking… can our lives get any stranger?

         Then other employees seemed to gather around us, each with their own stories of how haunted this particular store is.

         One sales rep said that she felt creepy in the back of the store.

         Another said that it looks and sounds like there are women going through the new clothes because you can see the clothes on the rack move like someone is going though it, but no one is there.

         They asked us if we could see and remove the ghosts right then. Laura and looked at each other and said sure!

         We each ‘looked’ in the environs of the store. I immediately saw a very creepy ghostly guy in the stock room; he liked to watch the pretty young women. He did not have good intentions. He wasn’t harming them in the strictest sense but his energy was very alarming. I immediately removed him. I had the impression that he had been homeless and exactly how he died was never clear. He did not have a long conversation with me. I simply had him removed and then I cleaned the energy of the back room.

         I also saw two ghostly women sifting through racks and examining the clothes. It seemed to me that both of these women had died in some type of traffic accident and had ended up returning to a place that had brought each of them pleasure. They really loved shopping. I had them escorted to the Heaven World.

         Laura saw the same things and together we cleaned the energy of the store and we could do all of this because the pretty blonde woman, Rosalind, who helped us was a manager and we had her permission.

         The ladies asked us to sign the book cards. We told them to keep in touch in the event any more ghosts found their store. They all told us how unnerved that these ghosts had made them. None of them ever wanted to open or close the store. They had all heard the noises. We felt that this was amazing. When Laura and I compared notes, we realized that we both saw the same things. It’s really great when two psychics can validate what each other saw and then get the people being haunted to also confirm that what we saw was what they were all feeling.

         Then Laura and I went to our appointment at the Apple Store, which we almost missed because we were so intent on helping the ghosts in the store across the way that we almost forgot why we went to Fashion Valley in the first place!

         I just made it. But it cost me an additional $160 to completely replace that shattered phone since the screen couldn’t be replaced.  AARGH!! But then I thought, okay, this must be why this happened, so I could help these women in this store. I thought that was the end of it.

         But it wasn’t.  

         More in Part 2!

KS&L 382 It's Just God's Will by Tina Erwin

         Recently someone mentioned to me that life is pretty much what happens when you are making other plans. But then those ‘other plans’ are just God’s will after all and that ultimately there is nothing that we can do about it.

         Really? What happened to free will?

         So, here’s the question:

         Are the things that happen God’s Will or the Free Will of the individual?

         Yes, things happen and we have free will in how we handle them, how we adjust. It's the point of free will. If we are left thinking that it is God’s will that horrible things happen then what’s the point of ever trying to improve things or make a difference?

          Lets look at an example.

         What if someone we love dies as a result of that person being in a car with a drunk driver. Our loved one made a conscious choice to get in that car. Perhaps he or she didn’t make a decision to die that night but they did choose to accept the risk of death that getting in the car would engender. This isn’t God’s will it is free will.

         Our family can go to pieces at the death of this person or our family can work diligently to heal. Which is God’s Will: healing or hurting?  But then ‘will’ implies a directed outcome, so why would God insist we hurt? Isn’t God helping us heal? Yes and no. We have a choice in how we heal any catastrophic event in our lives. We can rise to the karmic opportunity presented, and embrace our grief, pain, and suffering, or we can retreat from life and martyr ourselves for the rest of our lives. We make that choice, God doesn’t. However, if we choose to heal, God will help us find a teacher who can help guide our way to insight and understanding when we ask Him for help.

         But if it is true, that God wants us to heal, why does it hurt so much when we lose someone? It hurts because we have massive connecting ties to people we love and when those ties are broken, they come recoiling back to us and it is endlessly painful. But it doesn’t have to be painful forever. In this example we each have a choice in how we respond to any event. We can choose to heal it or to allow pain to direct our lives.

         So many people mistakenly think that an event is 'God's Will' and God has nothing to do with it. A person uses the gift of God: free will and makes a decision. That decision creates karma and that karma has to be satisfied. Everything happens in perfect order because Karma balances that order. God's will, if someone can call it that is really karma. What we do comes back to us. Every move we make creates a decision tree and how the karma is returned is always a function of which fork in the road we take, which branch of that tree we use.

         And karma never wastes energy so even a tragic event is pregnant with its potential positive consequence. This means that we always need to analyze what we learned from any event.

          Yes, life happens while we were making other plans because the karma that we create can come back to us at profoundly unexpected and usually inconvenient moments. But when each of us incorporates the lesson of a life-changing event and learns from it, then we acquire wisdom. Ultimately, that must be God's hope: that we will all become wise.

KS&L 381 Marriage Grease by Tina Erwin

      Courtesy is the day-to-day grease that makes life worth living. We make a request from someone with a sense of gratitude when we say ‘would you please’ do this or that. We honor that person’s service to us with an additional bestowal of gratitude when we say ‘thank you for doing that, or helping me, or answering my question, or returning my call.’

         ‘Please’ and ‘thank’ you are the spiritual/emotional elements that humbly remind us that we need other people to help us in so many ways, so many times a day. When a request is made of us without those magic words, it feels like we are being ‘ordered’ to do something, as if our freewill has been removed and we are now ‘required’ to do what this person demands. Dictators never say please and thank you.

         Family dictators can be relatives, grandparents, parents, spouses, siblings, and children. Children only learn about the ‘magic words’ of please and thank you from their use by their parents. However, the real magic comes when couples use the magic words between each other. And magic would be the key when it comes to these words.

         But there are some spouses who simply cannot say please or thank you to their husband or wife. When you ask why this is so hard to say, you get a variety of answers:

         • ‘Oh, please and thank you are implied. I don’t need to say it.’ Does your spouse know this? Is it implied for you too?

         • ‘I don’t have time for pleasantries, do you know how much I have to do with all of these kids? My husband needs to jump when I tell him to do something so I can keep my sanity!’  . . . .  Right. Bet he feels belittled all the time.

         • ‘Look, my wife knows that I love her and she doesn’t feel that need for me to say please and thank you every time.’  . . . Really, does she know that?

         • ‘I’m always in such a hurry that I don’t have time to do that, besides wives/husbands and kids don’t need please and thank yous. When you’re part of a family you don’t need that fake stuff.’ Fake stuff? When is common courtesy fake?

         • ‘Look, just do what I want. Got it? What’s your problem?’ My problem?

         The humbling concept of saying please and thank you force the ‘requestor’ to honor the effort of the ‘requestee’. Appreciation is always essential for any situation to work. Even the military never orders something to be done unless a situation is dire and someone’s life is at stake. Otherwise, it is considered military courtesy for officer and enlisted service member alike to say please and thank you. Gratitude eases all situation.

         In a marriage, this element is paramount. Couples with successful marriages never forget to be grateful for the efforts of their spouse. This –again – humble element helps to maintain balance between each spouse. Using these little words are the grease that gets things done on the often grinding day-to-day level of grocery shopping, putting gas in a car, putting kids to bed, making meals, cleaning house, and doing yard work. No, we don’t run around and gushingly say thank you for every single little thing, but the routine use of please and thank you make a huge difference.

         How big a difference? Consider that every single time one spouse ‘orders’ another spouse to do something and never shows any appreciation a drop of irritation is added to that person’s emotional reservoir. Day after day, drip, drip, drip of irritation is added to one spouse or the other’s emotional reservoir, slowly, deliberately, inexorably, poisoning that person’s emotions.

         How does this manifest emotionally? Irritation eventually turns to varying levels of despair, questions of whether or not that spouse is really loved begin to surface. If you love someone, you love him or her enough to honor their efforts – don’t you? Irritation can become irritability, which becomes impatience, which becomes short-tempered responses, which becomes hostility. Low self-esteem is another result and the feeling of worthlessness begins to creep into that person’s psyche. It’s cruel really, when you think about it, that one spouses selfishness robs the other spouse of his or her feelings of worth.

         How does this manifest physically? The body often mirrors emotional issues and needs. Skin anomalies may begin, other body problems begin to manifest and the person never fully feels ‘good’ about themselves, their marriage, or their choice of a spouse. There is a grinding feeling inside a person because the grease that makes a marriage work is totally absent. Without oil/grease in an engine, the engine will eventually seize. And so this little, tiny, seemingly petty detail of please and thank you will eventually cause a marriage to seize as well. Makes you wonder how many divorces could have been avoided if the simplest courtesies could have been implemented.

         Perhaps the greatest gift that spouses can give each other is the day to day, year after year courtesy that keeps a marriage happy. The greatest gift that parents can give their children is a good example of a happy marriage. And perhaps that gift can begin with ‘pleases’ and ‘thank ‘yous’, every single day