June 5, 2007

• Developing faith

• Guidance compared to a wedge in a door

• Multiple sources of guidance

• Communication between a fetus and an adult

Open your eyes to God’s presence. Open your eyes to the meaning of love. Open your eyes to what it means to find peace. Your lives continue to be characterized by individual paths filled with character, with great potential, filled with the potential to be loved and to be loving.

You are actually asked by your guides to turn your hearts, your thoughts to God. In so doing, you find yourselves greatly blessed by those opportunities that you seek to know God. Every human being has an equal ability to know something of God. It makes no difference whether you are governed by great intellect or moved through life directed by your own emotions and individual thought. Nevertheless, you all have a real potential to know something about the loving Spirit Center that you choose to call God.

No one knows all about God, and no one really knows nothing about God. The youngest of children and the oldest of human beings know something about God. Perhaps it is a strong conviction. Perhaps it is an inkling, a nudge, a hunch, a suspicion, a hope that there is a God. Merely hoping is a window that allows for God’s light to enter. The light does not need a fully open doorway. The merest crack will allow some light to penetrate. It takes little effort to recognize that daylight exists and that darkness exists. If you open the door a crack, you know. If you open a window by releasing the shutter and allowing a slight bit of light to enter, there is then no doubt that light is present.

It is difficult actually to be totally shielded from light just as it is difficult to be totally shielded externally from all sound. Even those with less hearing than is desired can feel the presence of sound. You can fully close your ears and yet if you stand before a bass drum, you know the drum is sounding when it is played for there are many ways of sensing the presence of that sound. You do not have to hear it with your ears. You can feel it with your body.

It is the same when you see God. Of course, there are moments of darkness when you desperately seek evidence of God’s presence, but there is nevertheless always an opportunity that is presented for you to recognize, however briefly, the existence of that Spirit Center, that Creator from which all gain life. Your soul is a kind of wedge in the doorway. It is that small sliver that prevents the door from being totally sealed, and because the wedge is there you have the ability to know when the sun provides light and you know when there is seeming darkness.

Your guides are also a kind of wedge in your lives, keeping the door open, keeping the window open and providing you with evidence of God’s presence. Just as there is no wedge that is large enough to be placed in a door so that you can see all that is illuminated by the sun, there is no single spirit entity that provides full view of God’s presence. But as you become aware of God’s light, even the faintest glimmer, you are, at least for a time, more willing to embrace that spiritual light within your own lives.

Guidance is a kind of wedge. Your soul within you is another kind of wedge that allows you from time to time to experience the reality of God. The door does not stay open forever. There are times when the wind blows strong and the door seems to slam shut. But whether the door is open completely or by the smallest margin or is seemingly fully sealed closed, the reality of the light outside does not change.

As you seek to understand God, as you seek to understand your own life within the context of creation, you must allow for those moments of vision and accept those moments when the vision is clouded. Developing faith is not something achieved as a result of a firm belief, for that is not faith. Faith is a belief in something for which there is no constant firm evidence, and therefore those times in your lives when the door seems closed are precisely the times that provide a ground upon which to build a faith that something does exist beyond the door.

Your seeking for knowledge is different than your seeking faith, for in pursuing knowledge about God, you are understandably and correctly posing questions that you seek to be answered. Just in the posing of those questions, you are exercising a commitment to God’s presence. Your relationship to spirit needs that exercise, but if you wish your faith to expand, then you must practice those moments when your belief, your understanding, falters. It is then and only then that you can be honestly motivated to seek an understanding of what it means in your lives as individuals to have faith.

Human life will always be characterized by a balance between what is believed and what is hoped for. With full knowledge, there is no need for faith. But unlike the faith that comes from an academic kind of knowledge, your spiritual strength comes from your exercise of faith. It is for this reason that we constantly explain to you the importance of accepting whatever happens in your lives that may not meet your own expectations, for it is in times like those that your conviction of the all-powerful, all- knowing God in your life is shaken. And it is through that shaking, through that doubt, that somehow hope remains even when in the background. When that is experienced, your faith can be strengthened.

How do you achieve faith? You achieve the conviction of a spirit presence in your life through experience, and it is when that conviction is tested that faith can flourish. How is that conviction achieved? It is achieved by many channels. It is achieved through these shared experiences when you are together, but the nature of your guides, the nature of guidance, is not consistently the same for all people. There are many ways of catching but a glimpse outside that door, outside the window. The messages that you share with one another comprise one way, and the guides that provide these measures are only part of the experience of connecting to your soul and to your day to day lives.

Yes, there are many different spiritual entities that can serve as a guide to a human being. Such entities, such spirit beings, are not unique to one group of people and fully meaningless to another. But each of you does share in the ability to make choices, and so for some of you in your seeking you will choose a particular means of understanding. Another individual, another group of individuals, may likely choose another means. Both are valid. In the end, it is not the means but rather the commitment to the importance of finding the way that is really important, that is really essential to your own growth and the relevance that you seek within your lives.

You can draw water from many wells. Some wells are more salty; some much less. Each well has a flavor of its own based on its experiences, what has happened to the well. The water that you drink therefore is not the same as what another may drink. And so it is in your search for spiritual awareness. What has meaning for you has no guarantee to be meaningful to the individual standing next to you. There is an appropriate way of gaining understanding for all human beings, but for each that appropriate way will be different. You are always asked to draw from the well that gives meaning to your lives. You are asked to consult your guides in a way that is meaningful to you.

The guides speak to you through many different means—for some, the nudge on the shoulder; for some, the need to speak or to write or to sing or to act out. There are ways that are appropriate for every human being. If you allow yourself to be as open as possible to the voice that is within you and the voice that is within another, you will find more readily a glimpse of God that you can take with you every day.

The question arose, “Is it possible for communication to somehow exist between someone anticipating birth and someone who has experienced birth?” This possibility is a real occurrence, so the answer is an emphatic Yes! But the question arises, “Who is speaking?” The answer is always the spirit guide. You receive your guide prior to birth and you are able to communicate yourself with that guide at a level commensurate with your state of consciousness. If you are aware of your surroundings in some manner, there is a consciousness. With consciousness, there is a direct connection between you and your guide.

Your guides speak to one another, not in words that you form, but there is a communication that we share with all spirits. If a guide has been informed that there is a particular need, that guide can communicate that to another. And if your mind is open, your heart is open, then your guide is empowered to communicate with other guides, and you then understand the unspoken needs of another.

This seeming miracle is not at all unlike two adults communicating with one another, yet not saying a word. Each of you has experienced an opportunity in which you recognize someone in need in a specific way. You may not know that person, you may never have met, but there is a sense of knowing. There is a sense of communication for there is an openness to the possibility of that communication. When you receive insight that comes seemingly without effort—an idea suddenly occurs to you, a concept suddenly occurs to you, there is some validating thought that you are suddenly aware of—such an experience is similar to what we describe and what has been reported. It is not specifically a communication unique between the unborn and the born, but rather it is a communication between two conscious entities that are different than your normal communication.

It is difficult for you to understand when nonverbal communication seems always shrouded with mystery, but from our perspective on the spirit plane, this is how we communicate and when you are witness to that kind of communication, you are witnessing much of what characterizes life beyond life. It is natural, for us it is very logical, it is the only communication we have, and it is through this communication that we reach each of you. It is this communication that connects you with your own spirit center.

Allowing yourself to be open to that possibility places you in the direct path of that light penetrating the doorway, for you are standing then in that light. It may be for a moment, but a moment is all that is needed to know that the light is shining. And when those dark moments come to you, you must always remember that somewhere beyond the door, the light is shining. It is dark where you now live, but the heavens are brilliant in sunshine elsewhere on your planet. Even though you do not see the sun, you have a firm belief that the sun still exists. Sometimes the night seems endless. Sometimes the night is racked with pain or doubt or fear, but you have grounds for faith that eventually the sun will return to your doorway.

Your being given life is a great blessing and you learn, you grow, you are warmed, and you are affirmed, motivated, directed by the light. Have faith that the light always returns to your life. There is a cycle of darkness and sunlight, of cold and warmth, of doubt and hope. Live with hope. Nurture your faith as you can. Be patient with it, caress it, respect it, welcome it, protect it, and above all bless the faith you are given.

Amen.