January 26, 2006

• Serve others with love, not duty, obligation, or guilt

• Conscious life elsewhere

God welcomes you to the ongoing journey of life. You do share the gift of life, and even though that experience is vastly different, one from another, you are given openness of spirit that allows you to draw from that common well the nourishment that each of you needs, physically, spiritually, emotionally.

Some of your sharing surrounded the issue of service with questions about the place of sacrifice, the questions about knowing what is adequate, what is enough, when you have provided the loving care that is needed to others. As you know, it is not God’s expectation that each of you sacrifices all for the purpose of others. There is a place in your human form of life for sacrifice, but sacrifice must be offered with a joy and a commitment that is the honest and direct outgrowth of love. Sacrifice that is surrounded by much pain in order to be of service to others is too often a sacrifice built upon a foundation of guilt. You do something because you are expected to do that…that’s not sacrifice; that’s obedience.

For sacrifice to have purpose, it is beneficial to both another and to yourself. Satisfying a guilt through a sense of obedience brings no benefit to you. Sacrifice, the giving of what you have to give, is beneficial when it is offered with only one condition, and that is complete love. When there is pressure for you to serve as a benefit to others, you must ask yourself, is that service because you are committed to its value, or is it service that is offered with a sense of duty?

It is important to recognize that as one gets older, one begins a process through which life is encountered through the lens of what is perceived as being needed. As a child, there is a dominant sense of what one needs. There is much less awareness of how one can reach out to meet the needs of others. As one advances in years, one is often more keenly aware of very specific needs. Those needs easily dominate the nature of interaction with others, and it is therefore common that family members and friends may be criticized for not accommodating the needs that are perceived. Your response as care providers to family members must be informed by a sensitivity to how those needs are realized and then how they are expressed. In extreme situations, no individual feels fully adequate to reach out and respond to all the needs that are expressed.

When you give to another out of compassion, you give because you’re moved from within to respond in an appropriately loving manner. The motivation comes from you. It may come as a result of needs that are expressed by another, whether individuals or communities, but your response is to reach forward, offering a hand of love because that is the action of a compassionate soul.

To be compassionate, you must be comfortable with who you are. You must be assured that you have both the strength and the desire to reach outward. When you respond to another out of a fear of inadequacy, that response is not healthy for you and ultimately is less beneficial to the recipient, for when you respond out of a feeling of necessity, the receiver of that response experiences what is provided quite differently from what is offered through sheer love. You know already that to be loving, you must have experienced love, and that being loving is the byproduct of that experience and it is the natural outpouring of your spirit center toward another.

Your spirit center is not characterized as guilt, or obligation. The act of love is not obligatory; it is natural. When you sacrifice as a sense of commitment to another, you must therefore examine always the nature of what it is you can give. If an individual is asked to give “A” and can in reality only give “B” with love, then the “B” response is the God-directed response. The “A” response is self-directed. You respond to the world around you only through love. When you are tempted to respond through a sense of obligation, reject that response and instead determine what it is you can do through love. Love is not obliged. Love is offered freely, and when what you do is offered lovingly and confidently, even if it does not meet the specifics of what has been asked, your response is a godly response.

So often you ask God for specific help. You know that when you pray for help, you are really praying to be open to the help that is there, for that is the only help that is appropriate. You may look around you after a prayer for help and ask, “Where is the help that I asked for?” The answer is that if you look to what is most beneficial for you, you will see the help. The problem is not that the help is not forthcoming, rather that you neglected, you refused to look for the help that is present. God responds to your prayers through love. It is not a response because you asked for a specific prayer, a specific response, a specific outcome. Pray what you wish, but be open to the response that is always forthcoming, for that response from God is offered only in love.

Your response to others who express needs must be equally directed by a commitment to love. It is the only way you can respond to another. You cannot be all things for all people, all the time. Those who try to be so are responding through a sense of obligation: I must put out this fire, then I must put out that fire, then I must respond to this alarm, then I must respond to another. Rather, it would be: I respond because I feel the commitment through love to respond to this request in a particular manner. That response then becomes the appropriate response.

Is it appropriate to pray specific prayers, asking specific goals? It is of course appropriate to pray in any way that provides you with a sense of connection to God, but having expressed your concerns, expressed your wishes related to someone else or yourself, you must become quiet. You must open the eyes of your own soul to be receptive to God’s response.

You respond to the requests of others as God responds to your requests. Help, support, affirmation, compassion are always best offered in love, and when you find yourself criticized by others for perhaps not doing enough, you may rest with the certainty that you have responded as you responded as a consequence of love. Reflecting on that, there is never need for guilt or a feeling of inadequacy or self-hatred. You are always acting in the spirit of God when what you initiate comes out of love.

You ask about societies, cultures, that are part of God’s creation but do not form a corner of your own understanding. Quite simply, the culture of human beings is not the only kind of human-like consciousness that exists. There are other life-forms which are really centers of energy just as you are centers of energy. Those life-forms have a consciousness of self as opposed to other. There is an awareness of me/you, here/there, good/bad. There is a consciousness of spirit. You are a form of energy. All life is a form of energy. Light is a form of energy, and you know that there are many frequencies of light that you cannot see. You have succeeded in harnessing means of identifying some of those forms of light, some of those kinds of energy, but there are many others equally real as you are, that you are unable to see or measure, let alone contemplate. The creation that is God extends far beyond life-forms that you know.

Ultimately all that God creates moves toward what is good. Ultimately all forms of energy—all forms—are converted, transformed into love. Trees, stones, the air, water, all minerals will be transformed. But those forms of energy that you see as trees and stones and minerals are no different in their potential for transformation than you. You ultimately become pure love. It is difficult to see, it is nearly impossible to imagine, but the components that make up human life are absolutely no different than the components that make up the rest of what is on earth and in the planets, in the stars and beyond. All is created by God, and therefore all has the potential for becoming love because the energy of each entity experiences a slow but steady transformation.

Human beings experience what is good and also create whatever causes pain. The “natural forces,” as you identify them create warmth and comfort, but also great destruction. Other conscious life-forms have the same dichotomy. There are life-forms that affirm and life-forms that destroy. It is not God’s wish that each life-form be totally separate from another. Human life-form will become more aware of conscious life elsewhere when human life reaches a stage that is appropriate for such awareness. That can also be said of these other conscious life-forms. They become aware of other entities as they evolve. In the end, all life-forms become aware of all other life-forms. The kinship is acknowledged and real peace is achieved.

Each of you is part of that process. You are not serving at the beginning of that process; you are not serving at the end of that process. But without your service, without your lives, the chain is broken. It is for that reason that your lives are so important for the ultimate peace, the ultimate love to be achieved. You are a part of that evolution, you are a part of that transformation.

It is our desire through love to serve you, to guide you in your part in that grand transformation. We serve you through love. There is no obligation. We do it because love is part of who we are. It is not because of an externally imposed duty.

Serve others through love as we serve you through love. Respond to the needs of others in love as God responds to your needs and prayers through love. We are bound together, all of us, in the potential of love, a power and an energy that truly unites the entirety of creation. You are blessed in that love. Live in it, live with it, live by it!

Amen.