I once succumbed to the Home Shopping Network’s excellent marketing. Even in the middle of the night, I would awaken wondering what the current special-priced item was.  I bought stuff I neither needed nor really even wanted. The deals seemed irresistible. My wake-up arrived with the maxed out credit card bill. When I came to myself, I promptly returned all the stuff and counted the experience as an important lesson in what happens when one allows themselves to be influenced.

Rigorous marketing isn’t only a potential threat to your bank account. In its most aggressive form, it can also attack your health. Discouragement and fear are sickness-inviting thoughts that act as aggressive marketing agents for disease. Without pity, fear opens the mental door to the possibilities of disease – selling vulnerability through a catalog vividly imaging stress, heredity, weaknesses, or whatever it would take to convince you that you must have the disease of the day.

Once fear has its say, discouragement wedges in to be sure that the mental door stays open, at least a crack, so that fear can come back for follow-up high pressure pitches. Discouragement’s tactic is to make a low-grade, constant pitch for all that is negative. Discouragement often slips in quietly, unnoticed; but once it is there, its presence is felt. As a back-up singer in the disease marketing duo, discouragement repeats the chorus-line of the song  of “What fear says, what fear says, you’ll never get away from what fear says.”

If you don’t want to buy what they are selling, be attentive to this high-pressure marketing scheme, whose chief goal is to get you to buy what you don’t want: a false sense of total isolation from God, Good.

Should you ever land in bed with a bad case of fear and discouragement, it helps to know it is never too late to wake up, regain control of your case, and boot out those marketers and their unsavory, lying goods. Here's how:

• “Be still, and know that I am God,” is the Psalmist's response to fear. Listen for that inner voice of spiritual reason – that clear, still voice of divine Love, reminding you that you are graven, tenderly on the palms of divine Love’s hands. You are safe in Love.  Love protects from fear and disease, and casts it out.

• “The Lord is in His holy temple! Let all the earth keep silence before Him,” is the prophet Habakkuk’s answer to the repetitive “Woe is me” of discouragement.

• The Lord is in His holy temple. Dive deep into the temple - your gratitude for what God is and does.     Let gratitude cut off the “poor me” fussing that would distract you from knowing, hearing, and feeling God’s presence with you at every moment.

• Put on Isaiah’s “garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness,” and you will find your mental door closed up tight to the influence of fear and discouragement.

I am talking about your house, your consciousness, here – your mental and physical space. You have the right and ability to determine what enters. And you alone determine what stays out.  Referring to Christ Jesus' powerful teachings, Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science discoverer, wisely wrote, “He also said, "The kingdom of God is within you." Know, then, that you have sovereign power to think and act rightly, and nothing can dispossess you of this power, and trespass on Love. If you maintain this position, what can cause you to sin and suffer?” (Pulpit and Press, 3)

Don’t buy everything the marketers try to sell.