One friend told me I need to imagine myself being successful and the good vibes I send into the universe will bounce back on me and shower me with success.
Another friend, a Hindu, told me that by putting my shopping cart back at the grocery store instead of leaving it in the parking lot, I was actually earning bad karma for myself, so the reason I hadn't sold a book yet was that I was being nice in the wrong ways. She has sold a ton of books, so who knows?
The Really Good Christians, the ones I fear I'm supposed to emulate, say stuff like "all in God's time," "God's time, not my time," and so forth. They accept things so passively. Whatever is God's will is my will, too.
I guess that's a good goal? It would certainly bring peace of mind in some ways. But then when bad stuff happens, you can only blame God, and that's not so good either. So the RGCs get around it by blaming it on the Fall. Or on sin. Or on man's brokenness. (Aren't all of those kind of the same thing?)
Someone told me God doesn't give you anything you can't handle. Someone else told me God will give me whatever gifts I need to handle whatever I wouldn't have otherwise been able to handle. Someone else told me God consistently gives us more than we can handle so that we come to depend on him wholly, humbly, and obediently.
All of this is really about the fact that I might get good writing news in October--or I might not--and if I don't, I might have to blame it on the fact that I told a few people about the possibility. But even though I try to believe in God, I still can't seem to escape the idea of jinxes.
