October 9, 2006

• Dealing with “difficult” people

• Predestination

God accompanies your journey of life. It is a journey. There are paths to be taken, there are detours, there are surprises and disappointments. There are moments of great joy and beauty, and there are moments of deep sadness and loss. But your journey on your own distinct and chosen path is actually always pursued in the company of others. What makes your journey unique from another is your response. It is not what happens, but rather how you embrace that reality and find the vision to continue.

This unique path that each of you follows contains upon it the same kinds of challenges that all human beings must encounter. It is, of course, true that there are many whose lives you’ve witnessed who seem to experience greater sadness, greater deprivation, greater suffering than your own. But that is much like studying in an institution where one teacher takes one position as an instructor that may be different from another. What is important is not the difference of the instruction but the progress of the student. It is your growth, this spiritual progress, which is ultimately the reason you experience life at all.

You all have the same lessons to learn, but the means of arriving at that destination are unique for each. As part of your journey, you encounter others who are on their own journeys. What you learn is the same as what another learns, but each soul has different needs. Each soul is in a different place in its development, and the lives that you live contribute to the expanding life of the soul in your own way. Your soul does not pick you because you are destined to have a difficult life or a less burdened one, for your life is not predetermined. There is no way that a soul who enters human life knows specifically the nature of the life it accompanies. Nevertheless, the experiences and your responses to your experiences become an important source of great strength for your spirit, and that spirit in turn gives relevance and perspective to your own lives.

Each traveler on its journey has a captain, has a guide, someone to help chart its way through the difficult seas and changing tides that are part of human life. We offer this guidance, we offer this ability to sense your own path because each of you has found a way of understanding your own guide, by whatever means you wish to describe that presence.

You were quite concerned about issues of interpersonal relationships. How do you respond when you feel unjustly taken advantage of or unappreciated or ignored? Much of what was shared comes to the truth that you respond to others in ways that offer respect if not agreement. You are not asked to take the same perspective as another whom you encounter on your pathway, but you are always urged to accept the necessity, the place, the presence of another on that path. You cannot be expected to agree with all that another may say or do or not say or not do, for your own perspective is colored by your own individual needs. Your needs are not the same, necessarily, as one who stands beside you or in front of you or behind you. Your needs are your needs. Your reactions in life are based on your needs and your understanding of what seems to be appropriate. You must always recognize that everyone has access to those same manifestations of needs.

It is human to live your lives by what you believe to be important. Attaching importance to something justifies, for many, actions that support whatever it is that is important. It was said tonight, “You cannot stand in another’s shoes.” You also cannot be guided or directed by the same spirit that lies within you and the spirit within another. You can only be guided by your own spirit and those spirits that share a commitment to the growth of your soul. As a result, each individual is truly directed in ways that are appropriate for that person, but may have no direct connection to what is appropriate for you.

Acknowledging this, you must then accept when others behave or respond in ways that you cannot personally accept. They are on their own journey. Since there are no winners and losers in these journeys but only finishers, the course their path takes is the course that is appropriate for them at the moment. It may not be appropriate for you. Likewise, the course that you pursue may be entirely inappropriate for someone else.

There are times when your journeys come together, when your paths intersect. It is at times that there are such intersections that you meet individuals and sense strong friendship. You may experience an unexpected feeling that it is almost as if you have known that person somehow in the past. The truth may be “you did.” The truth may be “it was in a prior human life and it is only now that your paths again intersect in meaningful and appropriate ways.”

Such intersections are normal and can occur frequently, but there are many more times in your lives when such intersections are not a common occurrence, when you become more deeply aware of your differences with another than you are of your similarities. But these differences are a difference of style and not substance. They are a difference of appearance and not direction, for each individual continues to evolve toward a final unity with God. If you allow yourselves to accept the common destination, you cannot question the means.

Of course there are those who willingly do harm to others, but they, too, are on a path of development. They, too, are ultimately one with God. Their paths may be filled with challenges to themselves as well as challenges to others around them, but you cannot judge the appropriateness of that path. As was mentioned earlier in your gathering, you don’t fully know why people are where they are or how they got to this point in their lives. You only are aware of where each of you is at the most superficial of levels, because your review of another is by nature on the surface.

You cannot fully understand what motivates an individual towards one action or another. Certainly there are actions that intersect with your life, with the life of another, that are to the core destructive, but that proclivity for destruction emanates from somewhere, from some experience. Indeed, it may come from a relationship that was in itself problematic. You are not privy to that information.

You cannot, therefore, sit in full judgment or decide you are going to teach someone else a lesson. You can, however, think through what you feel is an appropriate reaction that may condemn the behavior but support the person. That is one of the most difficult lessons or skills that you encounter. How do you separate an individual from actions that are taken? How do you uphold an individual and condemn what you feel to be wrong? You cannot surround yourself with a life of certainty based on what you believe to be unchangeable principles and yet condemn another, for to be absolute in the principle of goodness, there is truly no personal condemnation.

There is no place in life for antagonism. There is no place in life for hatred toward another. There is no place for jealously, for what is jealousy but a disguised hatred? No attitudes that are negative belong to absolute truth. If you experience jealousy, hatred, envy, impatience, you are not a keeper of absolute truth. No human being is, for if that occurred, there would never be place for condemnation of any kind.

Each of us on this side of the spiritual plane is different from one another. We each seek the same goal, but each of us pursues that goal in our own individual direction, upon our own path of development. We recognize when one path intersects with ours. We also recognize when a path diverges from ours. But when that happens, we are not critical. We do not condemn one another. We do not seek punishment of another. We surround each other with the loving support and the positive acknowledgment that each soul is where it is most important and appropriate to be. We learn in our plane what it means to accept unconditionally, to love unconditionally, to support unconditionally.

True love is always unconditional, but our state of unconditional love is not the state of human life. It is a goal, and to the extent that you do all within your power to be unconditional, nonjudgmental, and mutually supportive, you are coming close to our own experience. You will always have occasion to feel dismissed, to feel ignored, unappreciated, alienated, frustrated, angry, incensed. Each of these and many more such negative concepts belong to what it means to be human, but in your attempts to overcome these responses, your soul is drawn ever closer to becoming a state of pure love.

When you are loving, you also acknowledge that it is possible to not be loving. When you become love, there is no space in your consciousness for anything outside that condition. When you become love, you become totally love. That totality occupies all that you are. Pursue that state of unconditional love, but recognize those moments when each of you is truly loving. And when you experience occasions of not feeling loving, it is best to draw back and remember and remind yourself of what it means to be loving.

The path that you travel has not only a front view but a rear view. Part of your growth is recognizing what you have been through. It is acknowledging what flies out of the cocoon. It is acknowledging the butterfly once had a life that denied its capacity to fly. Flight then becomes all the more beautiful. Recognizing when you are loving and remembering when you have been less than that brings beauty to that loving experience, and that experience enhances and strengthens and uplifts you. It empowers you to seek more opportunities for beauty that comes from the state of being loving.

Allow yourself to look back on occasion and you will see something of your progress. If you think only of what still needs to be achieved, you are less likely to recognize the achievement you have reached. Being in the vicinity of those who may be unloving gives each of you further view of the importance of being loving. You are not perfect and you therefore cannot expect perfection from others, but allow your own imperfection and the imperfection that crosses your lives to be a part of your life. Allow them to present the potential for growth and an understanding of what human life carries with it.

You are blessed in your ability to see the path before you, but you are also blessed in your capacity to look back and find joy and encouragement in your own progression. Allow that joy and encouragement to be transferred to the actions of others and recognize that they, too, have progressed from where they had been and are on their way to achieving what is their ultimate goal.

Your lives are blessed by many pathways—your own and those of others with whom you have contact. It is a vast network and seen from our perspective, is one of beauty, for it is characterized throughout by growth and by an increased ability to recognize love and to behave in loving fashion toward one another. The view of these pathways is filled with growth, is filled with potential. The love that is achieved can only move outward, ultimately to embrace all in God’s creation.

Be warmed by that creation. Be warmed and strengthened in your paths. Embrace the intersections of those with whom you feel great kinship, and celebrate the journey.

Amen.