“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is a quote that Constance Mann-Leonard, a member and teacher at The One God One Thought Center for Better Living (OGOT), lives by. It reveals a truth that is proving itself right now as OGOT prepares for the arrival of Rev. Dr. Sheila McKeithen, author and president of the Universal Foundation for Better Living (UFBL), an international association of New Thought churches, centers and study groups dedicated to spreading the abundant life teachings of Jesus the Christ.
McKeithen will be guest speaker at a special Family and Friends Service held Sunday, July 16, 2017, at 9:30 a.m. The service is hosted by OGOT, located at 3605 Coronado Road in Baltimore.
“Having Rev. Sheila as a teacher makes me think through the subject that I am learning for myself as I prepare to teach others,” said Mann-Leonard, who facilitates Basic Truth Principles I & II at OGOT— twin courses that teach five practical principles to better living and how to apply them to daily living using universal law.
“Just because you hear someone say something, or even see something written down, you still have to ask yourself, ‘does it make sense to me? Am I in agreement with what I just heard or read?’” Mann-Leonard, recalled her days as a Truth scholar in one of Mckeithen’s classes. She remembers vividly, the spiritual advocate’s posing of the million-dollar question to gauge her students’ understanding of a subject: “Make sense?”
McKeithen, the spiritual leader of The Universal Centre of Truth for Better Living in Kingston, Jamaica, will discuss the art of healing— spiritual, physical, financial— from a New Thought Christian perspective, which essentially teaches the art of saying ‘yes.’
“Rev. Sheila is a living example of what faith, and the principle of true spiritual healing can do,” said OGOT Senior Minister Rev. Bernette L. Jones of the much sought-after spiritual activist, speaker, and nine-time author.
McKeithen contributed to Baltimore native Bishop Vashti McKenzie’s book, Those Sisters Can Preach: 22 Pearls of Wisdom, Virtue, and Hope (2013); and the documentary and book Discover the Gift (2010); created by Shajen Joy Aziz and directed by Demian Lichtenstein. Twelve Steps To Your Healing is her latest book.
“Whatever you choose will also choose you,” McKeithen teaches in the book. “If you choose to believe the worst about yourself and your circumstances, you will likely get the worst possible results. On the other hand, the person who chooses wholeheartedly to expect the best is more likely to succeed than one who chooses to believe that he or she is stuck with no chance of getting unstuck.”
“Yes” is an “action of the mind,” according to Charles Filmore, founder of the New Thought movement and author of The Revealing Word. It is the “mental movement of that asserts confidently and persistently the Truth of Being in the face of appearances.”
McKeithen’s got a firm grip on this truth under the tutelage of the late Rev. Dr. Johnnie Colemon, who founded the UFBL on spiritual principles that helped her to heal and live a long, prosperous, healthy life after receiving the news of a terminal health diagnosis that prescribed her six months to live.
In Mckeithen’s case, she was given six days.
“I was in my 20s, and had not yet learned to live, so I did not understand why I had to die,” she writes in Twelve Steps To Your Healing. “Discouragement— I encountered it. Pity— I joined many of its parties. Quit – I entertained it, until I changed my mind.”
That was in 1986— before she said “yes” to new thought patterns that “made sense.” Since then, she has developed a fine-tuned acquiescence to the Still Small Voice of her being— aka, God— that reminds her of the spiritual power to heal herself.
Nearly 30 years later, she is as committed as ever to serving as an instrument for hope and healing. Mckeithen brings with her a great wind of truth. She is a quiet storm, however, according to Rev. Lameteria Hall, assistant to the senior minister at OGOT.
She is bringing to us her presence as service. She is bringing to us a message of really walking the talk when it comes to service,” said Hall, who is already grateful for the expanded consciousness of the spiritual community at OGOT that will be a direct result of Mckeithen’s visit to Baltimore. “She is a humble leader. She is a quiet spirit— very powerful.”
“[McKeithen] exudes a spirit that shows up to serve, saying, ‘I’m just here to stand on truth…and not to be moved.”