Stand up and be counted.

If your principles of life are contrary to what you observe, stand up and be counted. Be willing to speak out for what truth is as you currently understand it, but in speaking out, such expression is never appropriate through pride or judgment. It is only offered through love. If you are in great disagreement with what others have done in their lives, it is fine to express that disagreement. It is fine to feel a kind of dread or a suffocating conviction that there is an accident about to happen. There is no sin, as you might call it, to feeling anger about wrongs that you see around you, for those feelings serve as guideposts helping you to chart and negotiate your own paths.



In opposing the behavior of others, affirm, nevertheless, their equal favor in God’s eyes. The individual who has never killed another is favored no more than one who is responsible for vast suffering and grief, because both lives contain the same spiritual values. Both lives are therefore sacred, despite what they may do. The penal system in society is always to point out what is contrary to current understandings, but those understandings change. And it is to be understood also that human beings change, change in perception as well as intention. The differences you observe between your own sense of morality and the behavior of another may be great and seemingly irreconcilable within your own society, but remember what your society embraces now is not what it embraced in the recent past, and it is not what shall be embraced in the future.



Society is a dynamic collection of energies, and these energies increase in perception, increase in understanding. You cannot fully condemn another. You can condemn behavior but never the person. You can condemn what society does but not what it can become. You can condemn prejudice and yet learn to love the one who acts out of prejudice. You can condemn as intolerable what another chooses to forgive. Condemnation and forgiveness are two sides of the same issue. That issue is judgment. That issue is a separation of another from you. There is no place for separation within the realm of Spirit. There is only separation when individuals are preoccupied with what separates and not what unites.