I paid the taxes and gained a divine dividend

Not long ago, I joined the ranks of freelancers. Tax tips from colleagues deluged my email account. As many established solo entrepreneurs like to remind people like me, one of the “perks” of being your own employer in the US is that you pay both the employer and employee share of tax contributions.

I know all about this. One year, in addition to having a full-time job, I started a seasonal cottage business. It brought in enough business that I wouldn’t be getting the tax refund I had gotten used to each year. That year was the first I would owe money to the IRS.

It was early April, just before the filing deadline, and I was at lunch, nibbling away at a sandwich and at the same time grousing mentally over the bite the IRS was about to take out of my earnings.

I probably wouldn’t have been upset, at least for the moment, if I had been listening to my internal voice of convenience. You see, the revenue from my side business was off the books—the kind of payment my clients would not have reported on their tax return. But I was in a position to report what was indeed taxable income.

So, the quick fix to my moodiness simply would have been to not declare the additional earnings. This, however, was an option I never considered because of a commitment I have to honesty, something I feel has been reinforced by my spiritual study and love of God.

But the grudge of having to pay the tax lingered. I didn't consciously decide to pray, although that's been my practice with past difficulties, but suddenly, effortlessly, I got a very clear and powerful idea—what I think of as a message from the Divine. In less time than it has taken you to read the previous five words, I realized I was part of universal good and inseparable from it. Suddenly, my grouchy thoughts went away and I felt blanketed in warmth.

“Universal good” was the phrase that struck me. It comes from a letter Mary Baker Eddy wrote: “As an active portion of one stupendous whole, goodness identifies man with universal good.”

I see honesty as a form of goodness, and I realized that in wanting to report my earnings fairly and properly, I was allowing myself to identify with that goodness. Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health, “Honesty is spiritual power. Dishonesty is human weakness, which forfeits divine help.”

Looking back over that moment, I can see that being honest led me to experience the spiritual power that brought about that instantaneous insight—that I can never be separated from the substance of universal good. Monetary income is limited, but the reward of honesty never ceases to bless.

Now, why hadn’t that been clear to me before? I thought. Because I had allowed myself to see good as conditional and limited to a specific thing—like money. With this new understanding, I no longer felt I had to hold on to every scrap of good—even if I had earned it.

You might be wondering whether any flood of ideas gave me extra money to pay my taxes that April? No. Nor did money appear from some forgotten or unexpected source. I simply wrote out a check—with a heart freed from the weight of thinking I was surrendering some chunk of good.

That change in thought has paid dividends to me in the years since. I’ve found that wealth just keeps flowing in—and I’m not just talking about money. For instance, volunteer opportunities at two different points in my life when I was between jobs developed into full-time work in areas where I had no formal training. Again, I saw the effect of good in action: that true wealth is deeply connected to being part of universal good, and is limitless.

I think of that whenever tax time rolls around.

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