Florence Scovel-Shinn on Anxiety, Fear and Belief in Interference

Daily Vigilance Anxiety and FearOne day I was impatiently awaiting an important telephone call. I resisted every call that came in and made no out-going calls myself, reasoning that it might interfere with the one I was awaiting.

Instead of saying, “Divine ideas never conflict, the call will come at the right time,” leaving it to Infinite Intelligence to arrange, I commenced to manage things myself—I made the battle mine, not God’s and remained tense and anxious. The bell did not ring for about an hour, and I glanced at the ’phone and found the receiver had been off that length of time, and the ’phone was disconnected. My anxiety, fear and belief in interference, had brought on a total eclipse of the telephone. Realizing what I had done, I commenced blessing the situation at once; I baptized it “success,” and affirmed, “I cannot lose any call that belongs to me by divine right; I am under grace, and not under law.”

A friend rushed out to the nearest telephone, to notify the Company to reconnect.

She entered a crowded grocery, but the proprietor left his customers and attended to the call himself. My ’phone was connected at once, and two minutes later, I received a very important call, and about an hour afterward, the one I had been awaiting.

One’s ships come in over a calm sea.

So long as man resists a situation, he will have it with him. If he runs away from it, it will run after him.

I repeated this to a woman one day, and she replied, “How true that is! I was unhappy at home, I disliked my mother, who was critical and domineering; so I ran away and was married—but I married my mother, for my husband was exactly like my mother, and I had the same situation to face again.” “Agree with thine adversary quickly.”

That means, agree that the adverse situation is good, be undisturbed by it, and it falls away of its own weight. “None of these things move me,” is a wonderful affirmation.

The inharmonious situation comes from some inharmony within man himself.

When there is, in him, no emotional response to an inharmonious situation, it fades away forever, from his pathway.
So we see man’s work is ever with himself.

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