Using miracles to pay the bills

"Ask and you shall receive." We believe the promise, but can we count on it? Can we count on it – say – to pay the rent, to pay the phone bill before service is cut off, to buy food before we get too hungry? No, jobs do those things.

But, what if the promise suddenly became real? Would you change your life? Would you quit your job? Would you go after your dreams? These are the questions that confronted my husband and me when a series of unusual events destroyed the life we knew. First, we lost our son in an auto accident. It was a horrible blow but it was only the first one. At the time of our son’s death, we owned a prosperous business that we had built using spiritual principles. A career criminal had infiltrated the business, attracted by the seemingly easy wealth. He struck when we stepped back to grieve (ouch). Four months later, we lost everything. We had our belief in "Ask and you shall receive," and that’s pretty much it..

I’d like to think that it was our destiny to test the promise, "Ask and you shall receive." It’s a nice thought, but the truth tells a different story. We were forced to test it because we didn’t have anything else. We couldn’t get credit to start another business. We couldn’t get jobs; there was no work for out-of-work entrepreneurs. Call it destiny or call it no other choice, the fact is that we did test the promise. Not only did we test it, we found out that it’s true . . . and we developed a blueprint (being serialized in this publication) which will begin to make it true for you as well.

Do you hunger for financial freedom? Do you dream about being your own boss? Would you like to find your ideal job? Do you have talents you’d like to develop? Would you like to write a book? Does your heart yearn to create works of art? Do you want to make your voice heard in the world? Do you want to challenge existing bureaucracies and organizations and turn them into something more loving? Are you impatient to find your true purpose in life? You can do it all. How? I’ll tell you, but I’ll have to start at the beginning of my story to do it.

"I think we should become authors." It had been our dream for many years, and what a dream it was. We wanted to become bestselling authors (why not shoot for the top?). My husband, Bob, wanted to write golf stories that brought the game and its heroes to life. I wanted to write a book that explained how we had built our prosperous business with spiritual techniques (before the career criminal took it from us).

There was just one problem: we had no money to sustain us. We needed financing, and in the life of James Audubon, the wildlife painter, I found an idea for it. Before Audubon published his sketches in books (and became famous); he had sold subscriptions to his books to support himself. He had approached ordinary people and asked them to buy a share in the royalties he expected to earn. It was a very popular idea! Audubon not only launched his writing career that way, but his partners helped him sell and market his work. The idea was perfect for Bob’s books, which depended upon support from the golfing community, and we decided to try Audubon’s idea.

We wrote a proposal; and just as Audubon had done, we approached people we didn’t know. Bob began with a man who owned a golf shop in Pinehurst, a man he admired as a gifted entrepreneur and as a golf lover. Asking for help was really hard for Bob. The betrayals of our employees had stung him deeply. He summoned enough courage to ask; and about a week later, Bob arrived at the golf shop to get his answer.

"Wait a minute." The golf shop owner spotted Bob coming through the door. He held up his hand to silence an employee who had just asked him a question. "I’ve got a few reasons why I need to talk to this man first." He pointed to Bob. "Actually, I’ve got about ten thousand reasons for talking to him." Bob had asked him to subscribe $5,000 but the man had decided on twice that amount – on $10,000. With his newfound support, Bob finished his first book – about the great golfer Ben Hogan. He sold it to a major publisher and actually received more than one offer for it. It was our first miracle, but there were lots of other miracles too.

We received a letter one day from the Insurance Commissioner of North Carolina who informed Bob that he had been left $1500 by someone in a will. We were never able to find out who left the money. We also received help with our publishing aims. A top editor at Viking adopted us. He took us to lunch in New York (lunch was $113 for 3 people!). He counseled us about publishing. He coached us as we wrote. He never bought a book from us; but, in all honesty, without his encouragement, we probably would have given up. Another top editor at Viking reviewed Bob’s second book as a favor to me. This editor reviewed it – pronounced it "A delightful read!" – and submitted it to another publisher for Bob. If you haven’t been in publishing, you wouldn’t know this: editors do not pass around manuscripts. It didn’t happen just once for us; it happened twice. I submitted my first article to an editor at Christian Science Monitor. He liked it, rejected it for the feature page he managed, but passed it on to another editor who snapped it up. I became a published author that day.

No one could have predicted the things we discovered! We learned how to make money flow with our minds. We found out what causes money to stop flowing, what makes it start flowing again, and also how to increase its flow. Oh, there were many times when we were afraid. Would the money arrive on time? Were we going to starve? But the money always arrived. Throughout our entire seven-year adventure, never once did we take a job. Never once did we stop writing. Never once did we compromise our dreams. Is "Ask and you shall receive" a true promise? It is true; and with the lessons in this serialization, it will start to become true for you.


You can also read Lesson One: The power of a dream, Lesson Two: Love, the antidote to rejection and Lesson Three: Why aren’t my dreams here yet?

© Copyright 2001, Mary Anne Thomas. All rights reserved.

Mary Anne Thomas is the author of "An Adventure of the Mind," a complete "how to manifest" spiritual workbook, available http://www.mindadventures.com.