April 9, 2009
God who is the loving source of all that is, surrounds your lives, illuminates your lives, and fills you with warmth and comfort and an awareness of love.
Each of you expresses love in your own particular way, based in part on the love that you have experienced, based in part on the relationships that have crossed your spiritual and physical paths. Much that you have shared together at this time is embraced in the reality of relationships—relationships with needs, relationships with others, indeed relationships with yourselves. For each of you to understand your life, you must understand more of yourself, for in building that understanding, you are more able to accept and embrace your relationships with others.
It is a truth that every individual needs to be loved. There is no human being created without that need. From your birth you experience the requirement, not merely a request, to be loved. What does that love mean at such a young age? It means being nurtured, it means being touched, it means being fed, it means being valued.
You wondered a bit about the meaning of “care” in our last communication. Caring is valuing. Valuing is always unselfish if it is to have meaning, and from that valuing comes loving. You can only love what you value. You can only love what you are aware of that is given meaning and importance to you. The issue of relationships begins with that valuing, that caring. You need to be valued by others. Others need to be valued by you. That mutual caring then leads to loving.
If you do not value yourselves, you cannot be loving. Those who seem to lack the capacity to be loving are those who do not value themselves. You must accept yourselves unconditionally. You must accept who you are. You must accept, to your understanding, why you are. The why is an important part of caring for yourself, for if you feel your lives are the result of chance, you are unable to give your own lives value. But if you understand that your lives are created because you are loved, and your lives are pursued because you are loved, you then find value because you are loved. First comes the experience of being loved. The recognition of your own value comes from the recognition of your being loved. Love is the evidence of being cared for. When you are cared for, it is a small step to respect why you are and who you are. As that personal respect increases, you gain in your ability to be loving, ultimately becoming Love.
You pray for friends. You pray for family. You pray for people you have never met. How can you pray for someone you have never met unless you value the existence of another? It is precisely your acknowledgment of the validity, the necessity of another that provides the framework for becoming loving. If you do not value, if you do not care for yourself, how can you possibly offer that to another?
Individuals who do not yet value themselves can find themselves in addictive behavior because through the addiction comes a false sense of balance, and it is the balance that is seen as the validation for oneself.
The search for self, the search for value is a process everyone experiences, but it is never a straight line process. Human beings go through periods of enormous self-doubt and insecurity, and that may be followed by a clearer sense of who and why an individual is. But the process is frequently painful. You see this process unfolding often with young people who rebel. They rebel against family, they rebel against parents, they rebel against leadership, they rebel against society, they rebel against others no matter what position they may represent. It is the process of discovering the answers to who and why.
There is no pattern that is followed by everyone. Some individuals experience this at a young age. For some, the experience belongs at an age of considerable maturity. For some who are dying, the question is still who and why. The response to that uncertainty is anger, is fear. That anger, that fear is expressed in countless ways. Even when you think you know the answers, when you are approaching your own transition, it is natural to wonder whether you have it right, or whether you have totally missed the purpose, whether your lives were justified, what it will mean if they were not.
Despite the difficulty of experiencing these stages of personal and spiritual development, such experiences are necessary. An individual who seems overly competitive in the workplace, to a point that is observed as being negative to others, such behavior is a direct result of the who and the why. You cannot be critical of yourself as you seek those answers, and you cannot be critical of others going through the same process. Nevertheless, experiencing them yourself or observing others in the process can be a source of great pain, great anxiety. The more you love another who is in the midst of this crisis, the more pain you feel, for if you did not love the other, it would have little impact.
The process of that discovery of who and why is a lifelong process, but the personal agony attached is associated with the more extreme expressions. That agony is not permanent. If you were not asking yourselves this question, who and why, you would not be here. You are here for the very reason that you are asking. The fact that you are here and wish to listen to your guides is an expression of that search. It is no more valid or less valid than the expression of another that is manifested in anger or separation or critical behavior. It is merely a different form of the same search. No human being fully knows who and why, but in the process of the search you do find answers, and it is those answers that lead you to caring, that lead you to loving.
From your understanding of the presence of spirit and the presence of your guides, you know that no life has somehow missed it. Each life is a part of its own process, a part of its own development. Each stage that you experience in life has a purpose. Each relationship you have in your life has a purpose. Each individual you know professionally, personally, each family member, each associate has a purpose. That relationship, each one, is sacred. Even in those relationships that cause pain and anger and frustration, relationships filled with sorrow, relationships filled with regret, there is benefit from everyone. There is no relationship without meaning. There is no relationship that is merely by chance. There is no relationship that is empty.
You are given each other for a purpose. Your lives intersect for a purpose. That purpose is growth—growth in caring, growth in your capacity to be loved and to be loving. There is nothing you encounter in life that is without meaning. There is nothing you encounter on our side of life that is of no meaning. All that we do, all that we experience is part of our own growth. You whom we guide are a part of our growth, just as we are a part of your growth.
Your loved one who recently made her transition is now a part of our sphere of life. It is a globe; it is not a flat space. It is characterized by no real beginning, no edge, no opportunity to fall off, to fall away, no opportunity to descend. There is only the opportunity to move forward. Her spirit is greatly lightened, and she is surrounded by the souls of all she loves, including those on your side, for there is no division between your souls and us. There is no separate space that is occupied. The spirit is the spirit. What changes is the body, but there is no change in the reality of spirit. The spirit is freed. The vision of the spirit is increased. The capacity of the spirit to be loved is increased. The capability of the spirit to become loving is increased, but the spirit remains. The spirit still exists. The spirit still loves, making no distinction between spirits that are incased with physical bodies, and spirits that are not so burdened.
You asked about wishes, stated needs, hopes, dreams. It is a fact that you do receive what it is you pray for, but it is also a fact that what you say you pray for is not necessarily that which you truly need. It is evidence of what you need. When you ask in prayer for something, whatever it may be, that request reflects a need far greater than the specifics of what you ask. We have said when you pray for health, you pray for balance. You may not consciously ask God for balance. You may consciously ask for health, for peace, but you are really asking for various manifestations of balance and in asking for the balance, even when you are not aware of it, that balance is there. That balance is yours.
When you ask God for something, God does not wait and say, “Ah, it’s been asked for. I will therefore give it.” That which you ask for is already there. What you are doing when you pray is actually praying to be open and receptive to what is already there. You pray for balance. God does not then provide balance, but in praying for balance, you are opening your own channel of awareness to the balance that is there. It is there because all that God creates is in balance. It is merely that human beings are not clearly aware of that which is there, and when your channel of awareness is opened, you see, you experience what has been created by God.
Love is not invented. Love is there for God is there. Balance is there. Peace is there. Health is there. Health is not necessarily a repairing of something that is physically not right. Health is a balance. It is an awareness that all is ultimately in the hands of God. You must merely place yourself in those hands. You must feel the embrace of those hands. You must see the light of those hands. You must feel the love of those hands. When you open yourselves to that presence and believe it, there is nothing to fear, and if there is nothing to fear, the issue of health takes on a reduced significance. Of course human beings pray for health, for no one wishes to be in pain. No one wishes to be ill, however that may be defined, but the pain, the illness, is always temporary, and it only takes on its power when you give it significance.
Pray for a vision of God’s presence. Pray for an acknowledgment that your prayers enable you to see what is there. Be guided by that vision. Be guided by the truth. Be guided by the love.
Amen.