Today is a new day -- brand new, like a shiny new car -- even smells new. But I am like a car dealer's son. He has grown up surrounded by new cars. He has crawled in them as a baby, played in them as a child, washed them as a adolescent, driven them as a teenager, sold them as an adult. New cars, for the car dealer's son, are normal life -- nothing special.

Is that how I see my new days? I've had a new one every 24 hours since birth. New days are my normal experience, and so, often, they seem like nothing special to me.

But what, in reality, is a new day? A new day is recovery from unconsciousness -- being brought from a dormant state, a condition of passiveness and helplessness, into vivid awareness.

A new day means being given back the mental, emotional, and physical abilities that you gave up the night before when you went to sleep. A new day is the gift of everything you had before, handed back to you -- plus the opportunity to begin again with a clean slate.

New day, help me to see, what a wonder you are.

It is very easy to get caught up in the daze of our lives -- to become unaware of the significance and meaning all around us. It is easy to get stuck in a fog as life whizzes by.

We often go through the motions of living without asking life's important questions: "Why am I here?" "What does life mean?" "What's it all about, Alfie, is it just for the moment we live?"

If we are not careful we can live our lives with no concept of what the Buddhists call enlightenment or what the Christians call salvation. In a world ablaze with purpose, we often can see nothing but meaninglessness.

Jesus put it this way: "Flesh and blood hasn't revealed this to you, but My Father which is in Heaven." Enlightenment is to see beyond the daze of the routine and rhythm of life and to encounter inspiration, calling, mission, the stiring of the soul, the heart aflame with the cause of fairness, respect, and justice for all.

If we will but look beyond the haze of our daze, life can amaze.

Once I purchased a small, plastic box with six pink buttons, called a Portable Mom. When you push the buttons a nagging voice says things like: "You're gonna to put somebody's eye out with that thing." "The answer is no!" "It's broken, are you happy now? I said no!"

I use my Portable Mom to illustrate negative self-talk. We all have an inner, portable mom that puts us down when our buttons are punched by setbacks, frustrations, or disappointments.

A key to happiness and peace of mind is to minimize the impact of Portable Mom by shutting it down as much as possible. We need to silence our inner misfortune teller.

But sometimes Portable Moms are hard to shut up! Once I spoke for the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists convention in New Orleans. I took a packed shuttle van from the airport to my downtown hotel. As the van pulled away from the curb I heard a sarcastic voice in the rear of the shuttle say: "It's broken! Are you happy now?" My Portable Mom was broadcasting negative sentences from my suitcase - nonstop!

I stared forward, hoping that the barrage of negativity would stop. It didn't! I experienced an inner panic attack as my imagination painted vivid images of me and my complaining suitcase being thrown off the bus. I asked myself: "Should I confess when people begin to ask about the disembodied voice showering us all with incessant disapproval?" They didn't. For 20 minutes no one even appeared to notice the put-downs. (Maybe they thought it was their own inner misfortune teller.)

As the van drove away I pondered how we, like the people in the shuttle, often fail to challenge or even question the inner voices that trample our self-esteem. Greenville Kleiser said: "When a thought that is in any way detrimental to your best progress arises in your mind, direct your mind at once to some desirable subject and thus drive out the intruder by substitution."

When left on automatic pilot our minds tend toward negatives. To avoid the turmoil of mental self-deprecation, we must take conscious control of our thinking. Martin Luther said: "A thought is like a bird. You can't stop it from flying across your mind, but you don't have to let it build a nest there."

Three principles for dealing with your inner misfortune teller are: 1) Don't think anything about yourself that you wouldn't allow another person to say to you. 2) Every time you mentally put yourself down, stop and substitute a sincere self-compliment. 3) Frequently repeat the following quotation from Paul of Tarsus: "I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself."

Like a hot air balloon, you will soar toward peace and happiness when you drop the weights of negative self-talk. Shakespeare summed it up when he said: "Lay aside life-harming heaviness and entertain a cheerful disposition."

The Tennessean recently ran an article entitled, Is Islam A Threat To America?. The article says that some churches are promoting the belief that "Muslims are out to destroy the American way of life." The Tennessean says: "The movement spreads its message through films, books and the Internet. Its sentiment: Islam is an evil religion rooted in hatred and nurtured by violence."

Both institutional Christianity and institutional Islam have used coercion and violence to expand their influence. Just look at history. Even nowadays, both churches and mosques support and/or promote war as a means of settling disputes between nations and as a way of compelling others to bend to their will.

The idea of forcing somebody to do something always reminds me of the story of a boy who loved to stand up in class. He refused to obey the teacher's commands to sit down. Finally the teacher threatened him with physical violence. The boy sat down, turned to another boy beside him, and said: "I'm still standing up on the inside!"

That is the problem with coercion. It doesn't really work. People can be forced to act a certain way and compelled to say certain things, but they cannot be made to believe something. A person who outwardly submits to and affirms either Islam or Christianity, yet disbelieves in his or her heart, is still an unbeliever (regardless of outward appearance).

Mystical Christianity and mystical Islam are different than their institutional counterparts. They believe that God can and does reveal Himself personally to individual human beings.

God doesn't want or need human coercion in order to get people to believe in Him and obey Him. God wants people to believe and obey Him because they are sincerely convinced that He is real.

When Christianity, Islam, or secular humanism (as in the former Soviet Union), try to control people's beliefs with insult, threat, coercion, or violence, they are doing a great disservice to humanity and to God. God gave people free will. What right does any institution have to deny people of their God-given ability to sincerely choose their own beliefs?

There is a big billboard on Gallatin Road in Nashville that shows a bottle of a particular soft drink (soda, if you prefer) on its side and has a caption of two words: "Open happiness." What a claim!

The Declaration Of Independence says that our Creator has endowed us with inalienable rights and that one of those rights is "the pursuit of happiness." Now, according to a billboard, that pursuit has been simplified. All you have to do is unscrew the top of a bottle of a particular brand of soft drink. Wouldn't it be great if that were true?

However, happiness doesn't happen so easily. In fact, happiness doesn't happen at all. It must be pursued, cultivated, developed, learned, engineered.

Happiness is a sense of joy and well-being. It is a feeling. Our feelings are created by the programming in our brain. A man programmed with negativity, guilt, rebellion, obsession, fear, anger, frustration, disappointment, worry, addiction, will seldom feel happy, no matter what kind of soft drink he opens.

Genuine happiness, the real thing, comes from a well programmed mind. Real happiness requires the training and hard work of developing your own personal uplifting mental software.

Begin to daily install peace, contentment, forgiveness, acceptance, hope, confidence, love, satisfaction, trust, righteousness, harmony. Establish and maintain a positive mindset. Remove and shut out the negatives.

Before a mental software program can be open, it must be installed. Have you personally built happiness into your thinking? If not, a soft drink, or nothing else can provide it for you.