This is an excerpt taken from Chapter 4, “The Power of Choice” from “Choosing the Life You Were Born to Live:  How Changing Your Thoughts Will Change Your Life” by Chris Sopa. Click here to purchase your copy!

“We did not come here to make choices. We already made our choices. What we are here to do is to learn to live into our choices and understand why we made them.” ~The Oracle, “The Matrix”

Choice is the most important gift we have been given in this human incarnation. Free will to choose what we want to experience and what we want out of this particular life is truly a gift. I find it hard to fathom how some individuals do not believe that they can create their own reality:  If this were not the case, why would God have given us the will to choose?

Having this gift requires responsibility—the responsibility to be aware of the highest, best, and most thoughtful choices. Not just the ones that benefit us personally, but the ones that benefit mankind as a whole. Choice implies conscious awareness. That is why becoming aware of what is limiting you is the first step. Once you are aware of something, you now hold that awareness in your conscious mind. It no longer sits in your subconscious mind, hiding and masking itself as fear. You now are conscious of it, which means you now have the responsibility to do something about it, to make a different choice.

“All we have are the choices we make, one at a time. And from such choices are created larger events of humanity. It is simply up to each of us to trust that every choice we make matters.” ~Caroline Myss

Chris Sopa is founder and owner of Chris Sopa International, Inc. You can learn more about her at www.ChrisSopa.com. Find her at Facebook.com/ChrisSopaInternational, Twitter @ChrisSopa, LinkedIn, and Google+.

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We’ve always believed in a thing called, progress. We’ve always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. For the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, until the shock of Watergate. We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”      ~Jimmy Carter, 1979

When I turned on the news at lunch-time today and saw the tragedy that happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, with tears running down my face I was flooded with thoughts, fears and emotions.  Having been a former President of a Board of Education, and knowing how hard local leaders work to make our children safe, to have something like this happen is unthinkable.

Between the shooting in Oregon at just the beginning of this week, to today’s tragedy, one cannot help but wonder what is happening in our world.  As I watch the news, many are looking to our leaders for answers and solutions.  Can things be done on this level to precipitate change?  Of course, but that is only the beginning.  We as citizens, as humans, need to remember our divine contract.  WE are the ones that have to make the change collectively.  This is not about the President, the school systems or the even the individual who committed this heinous crime…this is about the loss of balance in our thinking and actions as a whole…as humanity.

Tragedies do not happen because God is punishing us or those involved.  Tragedies happen to balance what is out of balance.  What causes us to fall out of balance?  Our individualist thinking, our loss of community, our selfishness, our fear, our focus on those things that fall away such as material items versus those things that matter such as the ones we love and our relationships.  God and his angels watch these events with tears falling down their faces just as we do, and they are there to surround those who are suffering and hold the space so healing can happen.  But God is not to blame.  God does not “allow” this to happen…we do.  He created this reality for us to be joyful, loving and live in a “paradise.”  WE are the ones who fell out of balance.  We took our free-will to a place that no longer serves us.

The energies surrounding us at this time will no longer tolerate hate crimes and individualist thinking.  Time has run out.  It is time to change.  Those little ones who died today sacrificed their souls to show us that our children cannot be vulnerable anymore and to show us that we need to drastically change.

Pray for those who have crossed over, pray for those who survived and have to now cope with what they witnessed, pray for our leaders to make the necessary changes to move us in the right direction…but most importantly, pray that YOU are strong enough to make the changes that you need to make to step up and be the person you were born to be.  If we each do our small part, we can change the world.

In honor of the little angels and adults who sacrificed their lives for our learning today…Love and light to you all.

Chris

Psalm 147:3         “Heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds.”