Steps

Many still hold to a Pollyanna based view of life.  Everything will work out for those with an innocent heart.  Life will move from difficult to easy.  When everything settles peace, harmony, and love will reign.  The basis for this new life comes from experiencing the touch of one with a heart of love, unselfishness, and freedom.
 
The view is readily dismissed by almost everyone I know.  Even those who still hold onto a fragment do so views that are more aspiration than reality, more dream than sweat, more idealistic than the present moment.    Life cannot be this simple!  Things do just change because of a simple child.  Reality is much more complicated than this.
 
Life is more complicated yet the solution is as simple as Pollyanna.
 
The blunt facts rest in a mire of inconsistency, failures, and weaknesses.  We do not have within what is required for a future filled with hope.  In addition to our gaps there is the additional hurdles and obstacles placed by those around us driven by the god of “self”.  They want to climb on our mistakes and accidents. 
 
The solution resides in two steps.  The first requires our acknowledgment, acceptance, and endorsement if the second is to touch our soul.  Divinity offers you and me “this Decree, therefore, of the Master, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, the Strong One of Israel: ‘This is it!  I'll get my oppressors off my back.  I'll get back at my enemies.  I'll give you the back of my hand, purge the junk from your life, clean you up.” (Isaiah 1.24, 25)  The process may be painful, it may hurt, but the cleaning process is where everything begins.
 
The second is presented by the life of Pollyanna (Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1960), simple and fully be present in the moment you find yourself.  It doesn’t end there.  Give love, compassion, and mercy away – as fast and far as you call.  Embrace the best in those around you.  Model what it is like to give and live in a community with unconditional acceptance. Let others experience your soul, heart.