October 30, 2006

• No requirements for guidance

• Dealing with loss

God speaks to every one of you in ways that are understandable to each. The voice that is God is not necessarily a voice that everyone hears in the form of words or even with the knowledge that somehow this is the best way to proceed. Often God responds and your guides respond in a form that is totally unrecognizable for any of you, but God and your guides are nevertheless always present. You are encouraged always to be open to evidence of God’s presence and our presence, but it is important that each of you acknowledges that it is not required that you always be aware of that presence.

There are no requirements that belong to a loving relationship. Our relationship to you is loving. Our relationship to other spirits is only loving, but there are never conditions or requirements that must be felt in order to receive that aid. You receive God’s loving help for one reason only, that being that offering such help and assistance is what love is. It is the condition of love, pure love. There are no sets of requirements for anyone to be guided. There are no sets of requirements of how you must live your lives.

You understand already that the goal of human life is the acceptance of relationships that are loving—the relationships between individuals, between individuals and the environment, between the animate and inanimate. It is the condition or the pursuit of being loving…that is the goal. It is not a requirement.

And so we can say to you, you are not required to pray. You are not required to think of your guides. You are not required to do anything in order to receive that spiritual help. You are encouraged to be loving. You are encouraged to look within to know what resides within each of you that is permanent. But our response to your needs and God’s response to your needs comes without your prayer. Your prayer, your asking for assistance, is a way of your becoming aware of that very help. God reaches every soul, whether or not that soul acknowledges the existence of God.

Each of you has experienced loss of one sort or another. That is part of the human experience. We, your guides, also experienced loss in our human form, but as we evolved and became pure spirit we realized that the losses that we experienced were not losses. They were changes, they were alterations, they were shifts in energy. They were shifts in experience, they were additions of new experiences, new opportunities for growth. The truth remains constant that there is no loss among all that God creates. Everything that is created by the Spirit Center, God, remains.

There are changes, just as you change individually, just as you change physically, emotionally. Those changes don’t mean loss. They really are alterations. They really are an expansion of your opportunities to grow and to evolve, to become deeper, to become more compassionate, to become better listeners, to become better healers, to become more loving.

Your human lives, therefore, are filled with a potential for new experiences, new challenges, new opportunities for growth. When one opportunity changes and another is presented, the opportunity that no longer remains is not a loss. It is still a part of who you are. It is a part of your human experience. It is a part of your spiritual growth. Nothing is taken away. It is only changed.

For you, this is difficult to see, it is difficult to accept, it is difficult to acknowledge. When you look back upon your collective childhoods in this group, you don’t see your childhood evolving into adulthood as a loss. It is a significant change, it is growth, but it has not been lost. When those whom you love are no longer with you, it is easy to feel you are being somehow denied their presence. You have “lost” them. From our perspective, we see that relationship that you had, regardless of its nature, as being something that provides depth in your lives. Can it create sadness? Yes, it can create sadness. The sadness is about change. The sadness should not be about loss.

When you feel true loss, you feel you are being denied something that should be or has been yours. But none of you own your lives. None of you are one hundred percent responsible for everything that happens in your lives. None of you are asked to identify your entire sense of self-worth on the basis of something you have. You are being asked and encouraged to see yourselves for who you are, not for what you have. You should see yourselves as individuals who encounter what life presents, but that life that you experience is not a life you own. And what you consider to be lost, therefore, was never fully yours. The loss does not exist.

Certainly, there are moments in your lives that you would like to recapture. There are moments in your lives that you cherish and you wish would be retained. There are moments in your lives when you have great expectation for the future and that is okay, but it is much more the truth that when these expectations from these events coincide with your lives, you are actually witnessing a change in opportunities. It is the “glass half-full or half-empty.” Since nothing is truly lost and since there is something to be gained by every experience you encounter, the glass is half-full and it is continuing to be filled. You are asked therefore to welcome and accept changes as they occur, not because they fulfill your expectations, but because they form the fertile soil for significant growth and development and for the evolution of a loving presence as it is identified in you, in each of you.

The question was raised about how to know when to act and when to serve. There is no fine line that is drawn in the sand indicating whatever is beyond this line requires action, or it doesn’t require action. If you wonder how best to respond to events in your life, praying for the knowledge to make a decision allows you to make that decision with the confidence that what you do is what you must do. Your decision is correct. All the decisions that you make are correct if viewed with a recognition of potential for growth. When growth is the result, no decision is fully wrong.

You may make a decision which in the eyes of others is considered destructive, but it is not for others to make that decision against your actions. Others may feel it is entirely inappropriate. It may cause great pain for another, but a judgment cannot be made in absolute terms. When you see actions that you disapprove of, when you see behavior or attitudes that you feel are inappropriate or destructive, you may wonder whether to act, to do something or to observe. Sooner or later you make those decisions. Even if you have not prayed for guidance, you will be given guidance.

Any decision you make about any activity in your life has a positive and negative consequence. There is no action that is only positive and likewise there is nothing you can do that is absolutely negative in all respects. We see this clearly from our side, and yet it is extremely difficult to accept within the human condition because each of you is aware of suffering and pain. You are aware of the consequences of actions that are injurious to others. You do not wish to foster that. You do not wish to support that condition, but you can choose to oppose it in principle, to oppose the action, to oppose the judgment that led to such action.

But you cannot judge. You cannot judge the other. You cannot judge yourself and say, “I should have done this but I didn’t,” or “I shouldn’t have done something but I did.” That kind of judgment is superficial at best, and it can be destructive at its worst for you can destroy your sense of self, your sense of growth, your sense of evolution to becoming loving, for in loving others you must love yourself. Castigating oneself for actions leads to a kind of self-destruction. You must, each of you, have confidence that if you decide not to take action, that’s okay. If you decide to become active on a particular cause that you hold to be important, that in itself is also okay.

There is no condition in human life where you can clearly say that it was wrong to have done something. It may be wrong for one individual, but that is not the individual in question. You can’t set your standards according to the lives that others must lead. Your standards are for your own life, and you will find that those standards that you hold so sacred often change, and with that change may come a sense of guilt, a sense of loss, a sense of remorse. How many times have you made decisions in the past that you thought were correct and later you thought were incorrect? The truth is you made your decisions based on the path you were on, and based on your own development. You cannot therefore go back and say I should have done something. When you do that you reflect a loss—a loss of self-respect, a loss of self-worth—and if you take that approach toward another, you have then lost your respect for another. That relationship may be felt to have been lost.

Again from our perspective, those events are not matters of loss. They are matters of development. They are part of a life given over to more opportunities for growth. The love that you express, the love that you receive should always be accepted as it is offered. And when you seek compassion and do not receive it, you are also being given love from an invisible source, even without your recognition. The voice of God, the speaking of God, the speaking of your guides may be totally inaudible but they are nevertheless constant. And because you are being the recipient of God’s guidance through your guides, you can always be assured you are doing what is appropriate for you at this very moment. What others do is appropriate for them. Your not sharing in the values expressed by another does not mean the loss of a relationship, but a transformation, an opportunity that is being presented, an opportunity for your response. For you cannot be responsible for anyone else…you can only be responsible for yourself, your own actions.

Life is filled with this split between what is considered right and wrong—when one action is perceived correct and later felt to be incorrect, when actions are felt to be incorrect and later are acknowledged to be the right actions to have taken. Your human lives are filled constantly with such insight, with such growth, with such evolution. Make a point of accepting your own actions and accepting your own inactions. Make a point of accepting the changes that life affords—changes that may not be anticipated, changes that you may not feel are wanted—for those changes hold the seeds for greater growth, greater depth, more opportunities to become loving, and it is those changes, those opportunities continually falling upon your soul that gradually and steadily bring your soul to absolute love. It is a process. It is a kind of evolution that you all are part of.

Accept those changes, be they labeled as a loss or not. Accept as important whatever is unanticipated. Accept paths that cross your own lives and intersect with them. Accept the individuals that travel along those paths. Accept their importance, the gift they bring to your own life, and rest assured that you are held in God’s loving care at all times.

You are loved. You have always been loved. You will always be loved. And you will ultimately be Love.

Amen.