August 2, 1995 

• Dealing with negative emotions

• Welcome challenges 

• All humans are equal and united with God’s presence 

• Prayers for the dead benefit all 

• Guides are known by their lights, not by name 

God is indeed with each of you. God’s presence is powerful, uplifting, and totally loving and forgiving. You, of course, have much to be thankful for. You have much that you pray for forgiveness of. You recognize your own failings, but you also seek out the reassurance that God is a part of what happens in your own lives. 

You are correct that you are where you are in your lives because it is what is appropriate. This is not to encourage you to be complacent, but to accept the value of what is, not with an idea that it cannot be changed, but only that what is is important. The experience of grief, remorse, sadness, anger—any of these emotions are appropriate. They are a part of and necessary to human life. It is okay to grieve. It is okay to be angry. It is okay to be impatient. Each of these experiences is to be overcome ultimately, but that does not take away from their value, their okayness to life. 

You are in your lives where you must be. If you can remove the anxiety and fear and worry, you will free yourself to develop and to grow and to become strengthened by all that life provides. Fear and worry can only result in things that are negative. Anger is not negative, for it leads to understanding, either of oneself or of another. But fear and anxiety are debilitating, for they restrict your ability to see beyond yourselves. When life takes a turn for the worse, as you might say, the anxiety that may come, the fear, acts as a kind of mask that separates you from the potential. By eliminating fear and anxiety or by lessening their influence in your lives, you are then free to move forward and grow toward God. 

When one achieves inner peace, it does not mean that one is unaware of the turmoil from without. It means rather one sees the turmoil and one is open to the potential that belongs to the turmoil. Openness to such potential does not require constant optimism. You can be open and yet discouraged. You can be open and yet frustrated, but you are still open. The discouragement, the frustration, will change and evolve and ultimately allow you a wider view. What is essential here is your capacity to accept the necessity of what is at the moment. Human life will never be a perfect balance. 

Human life will never be conducive to total inner peace. Those who claim to have complete inner peace while in human form have effectively separated themselves from what it means to be human. The cleric who resides for many years alone with his own thoughts may achieve much insight and yet not learn what is to be learned. One cannot shut oneself off totally from all that is human, for that is denying yourselves the benefit that may be experienced only through human interaction and experience. 

Your lives therefore take on a kind of sacred importance, for there are lessons to be learned that can be learned only within the context of life as you know it. You should therefore welcome those challenges when they come. You should accept your feelings as they are felt. You should reject what limits your vision and embrace all that has within it the potential for growth, for insight. You should embrace all that has within it the opportunity for the expression of love—its giving and its receiving. 

Each day is indeed important and each day comes to its own conclusion. There is much that you can do to control and influence that day, but it, too, ultimately finds peace. Every day is followed by the night, which is the preparation for the next day. By worrying about today all through the night, you become unable to accept what the morning shall bring. 

The peace that each of you seeks is a peace that is obtainable. It is a peace surrounded by the knowledge that God is a part of everything, that God is in the actions of others as well as your own. Even when those actions are negative, even when they may bring harm to another, God is present. God may not direct those actions, but God is indeed present in the exercising of all that happens. 

Think for a moment of your own actions for which you may not be especially proud. Despite what you may regret, you should recognize that God stood beside you, that God was still a part of who you were, just as God is continually a part of who you are and who you will become. 

The constancy of God is undeniable, in your own lives but also in the lives of everyone else. Individuals who bring great suffering to others are as near God as you are. Those individuals are no less a part of God. They are no further from God. They have not been forgotten or ignored or shunned or punished by God. God is not a judgmental power. It is humans who judge. It is God who provides an all-encompassing, forgiving love. There is nothing that you or anyone else in life will ever do that will move you away from God. 

There are no individuals who will find themselves closer to God because of what they do. There are no human beings who, therefore, stand closer or further away from God. You are all absolutely united with God's presence. This realization should provide comfort when you are hurting, when you are filled with grief, for during those times you may lose sight of where God resides in your life. But despite the limited vision of God, the presence never changes. 

You pray that another may be drawn toward God. You are all being drawn toward God. What you are really praying for is that another becomes more open to the God who is already there. You cannot order your life in such a manner that you sit closer to God as a result. There are those who are viewed as godly people, in your terms, but those are not closer to God. Perhaps they may live a life that reflects their awareness more poignantly, but they are not closer to God. They are no closer to God than one who awaits execution on death row in some prison. 

You are all equal. You all have the opportunities for growth and enlightenment. It is just in your hands when you will make the decision to seek out that light which is so present in everyone's life. You do have control over that, and you can decide to move toward the light. You can decide to close your eyes and move elsewhere. Regardless of your decision, the light is constantly present. Your lives are filled with many opportunities. Each of you has seen evidence of God's light. Each of you has responded to it and each of you has ignored it. God's reaction in the latter case is not one of anger or judgment. God is simply present. 

You have much reason to rejoice in what you are given in human life. You have much to be thankful for. Relish your experience of each day. Take away from each day something that you can recognize as giving evidence of God. It may be a smile that someone offers. It may be a comforting gesture. It may be something someone said. It may be something you did or said which, when you reflect upon it, reflects in itself God's presence in your life. Whatever the case may be, it is important to find some aspect of God's presence in your daily life. 

At times you have to work for this, but the exercise is most helpful because over time you become more aware of the reality of God's constancy in life. How can you deny God's presence when you can recall every day the recognition of God’s light somewhere in your experience? For us, the recognition of that light is greatly facilitated because we are not burdened by physical limitations. We are sustained only through the spirit. We communicate only through love by receiving it and by offering it, and so we are reminded constantly of God's reality. But when living in human form, there are too many opportunities for losing sight of that presence. You must, therefore, exert effort to reexamine your daily activities in order to find reassurance of God's presence. 

Your prayers for all who have joined us are so wonderfully helpful to each soul. If you could but observe for a moment the benefit of those prayers, you might nearly wish to do nothing but pray. All benefit through your prayers. When you pray for one who has joined us, we too, are strengthened because we are strengthened by the light that is reflected from the one for whom you pray. 

For you, we have no specific names. It is not important what our names are, for we no longer go by name. We are differentiated from one another by light, and light has no name. There is no need for it. But we do indeed benefit when you pray for others, not even praying for us. Our lives are strengthened by your prayers. And so it is that the spirit nourishes the spirit. We are nourished by your prayers, and you by ours. 

We recognize you, we find you, not by your appearance in physical form, but by your own individual lights. We do not see the physical form, for that requires the presence of eyes. It is not important to us what you look like, therefore there is no reason for us to see that in you. We find you through your light. You find us through your prayers and through your openness and receptivity. That is quite enough. 

Our prayers surround your souls. Our prayers enfold your concerns. Our prayers are strengthened by the proximity we all share equally with God. God’s love is your love. God’s love is our love. God’s peace is shared by you and by us. God’s light is reflected by us and through us to each of you. Reach up to the light, grasp it, bring it into your souls that it may illuminate the light that is around you. 

We bless you now in that light. 

Amen.