September 23, 2014

• Questioning is encouraged

• Why suffer?

• God is present

God and each of your many guides look upon you with love and surround you in light. You express your gratitude, and you share your questions. It is very appropriate to recognize that when you ask questions, you ask those questions with the hope and the faith that there are answers. You don’t pose questions toward a vast emptiness of silence. It is important that you interpret what we say about the need to be questioning. It’s to be balanced with your understandable and valid need for responses.

You gather each time filled with questions, and we join you, not to ask more questions but to provide a context within which each of you finds your own answers. It all begins with the questions and continues with the answers that you receive, but the cycle continues further in that what you receive from us, from your guides, is offered with the hope that you are led to more questions rather than comforted through a sense of complete knowledge. That sense of wanting to know more so that the insight you gather has meaning is an important part of your spiritual experience. We provide context, you find questions, and that context is in itself a kind of answer, but it is only an answer of context. It is not an answer of finality.

You pose collectively a question which lies at the heart of all who try to grasp an understanding of who, what, God is. Why the suffering—personal suffering, collective suffering? Why the agony? Why the pain? Why the worry? Why the tension? Why the stress?

So often you have heard from us that these are challenges through which each of you will grow, but that is hardly consolation when you are currently engaged in those moments that create the anxiety, the fear, all that you associate with being negative. It is easier to say “suffering has value and you can grow through your suffering” when you are not suffering personally, but when you are, then such statements have little meaning, for you are engaged in the process of dealing with suffering rather than the commitment to its value.

No one wishes to suffer. No one wishes the pain of personal loss. No one wishes concerns about another’s safety, health, or well-being. It is of little value to tell one who is going through such agony that “this is as it should be, and you’ll grow and strengthen,” for no one feels that growth. No one feels that accumulation of strength.

You ask us “why the suffering” just as you may ask a friend “why do I need to go through all of this?” The answer is not a “because” kind of answer. The answer is “God is present; God is present.” The meaning of that varies in significance depending upon who hears it, for some hear and are angry, others hear and understand, and for others there is too much agony to hear even that.

For many, “God is present” carries more significance, immediacy than saying “God is.” We have often said to you collectively, “God is, and therefore you are.” We have also said conversely, “You are, and therefore God is.” For some, the connection referred to in each statement is clear, but for others, “God is” is not enough, for one can say “God is, but God is not necessarily concerned about comforting me.” For some, they can affirm that God exists, but they have difficulty in affirming that you exist in God’s loving presence, in God’s eyes. So we can clarify the statement of “God is” by affirming that not only “God is” but more especially “God is present.”

No human beings, no creatures of the earth, no forms of life anywhere are beyond the view, beyond the presence of God. But what does this mean? It means that your needs, your concerns, your agonies, the crises that you experience are all within the view of a God, a God that is loving, a God that is always responsive, a God that responds even without your asking.

God’s response is always based on a loving recognition, a full recognition of need. All human beings exist on a plane of life filled with needs, needs that must be responded to. These are needs that are being responded to, even without request.

Your prayers, as we have said, serve essentially to open you to that response. Your prayers are a reminder to you that God is present. If you did not at some level believe in the presence of God, would there be a point of offering prayers to God? You cannot pray to an entity that you are convinced is nonexistent. Prayer only comes out of faith or hope. It may emanate from a condition of fear, but it is always sent forward with the faith that somehow those prayers will be answered.

The truth is, those prayers not only will be answered—those prayers are answered, and they are responded to immediately. There is no response gap between what you pray for and God’s active expression of love. There is no time gap because there is no time. When there is a need, it exists accompanied by the reality that God is present. What is important for each of you is to recognize not just that God is somehow present, but that within your abilities you can know that the loving response of God is already a part of every corner of your lives.

Why is it then that human beings suffer if there is reason beyond “you learn through your suffering?” There is suffering because there are always places of interface that actually join all that exists together. But such joining does not mean all move in the same direction in perfect harmony. Joining means there is a confluence of reality, reality of one kind of experience and another. There is the reality of natural forces. There is the reality of human needs. There is the reality of human physical balance. You identify that as “health.” There is a reality that points to the fact that all that exists has an integrity of its own and belongs to a much wider web.

You are given life to grow—to grow in spirit, to grow in understanding—but you are given life not in a vacuum. You do not live in a bowl somehow isolated from all else. You live in a world that has many levels of life, many levels of existence, many levels of energy.

You, each of you, is a particular level of energy. Your energy vibrates, it moves, it changes its character in very special ways that allow you to see one another. You recognize that. You also recognize there are many other forms of energy that you cannot know of through your senses. You cannot fully appreciate waves of energy that create light invisible to the human eye. You cannot see the energy that takes place in the space occupied by two people or two million people. You don’t see that energy. You may feel an emotion which is a form of energy, but you don’t see all. You cannot hear radio waves. You know they exist because you have machines that have been constructed that respond to radio waves. The fact that you cannot see them does not deny their existence, so there are many vibrations of energy that you cannot see, but those vibrations have an impact on your lives.

You are not designed by God to be all-seeing, all-knowing, all-sensing. That simply is not what human life is designed for. There are many forms of life that you are aware of that sense energy that you know nothing of. Birds sense light and magnetic energy in ways that are unknown and unfelt by human beings. Human beings evolve in their perception of God in such manner that is unavailable to birds. But your awareness of God that is not the experience of birds cannot mean to a bird that God does not exist. The energy that is God is simply a different kind of energy. The energy that birds perceive is simply a different kind of energy from what you perceive. And so it goes throughout earth, other planets, other solar systems, other stars, other galaxies, other universes. But all of those forms of energy belong to what has been created, and therefore they do belong to existence as you experience it.

You’re aware of enormous human suffering as a consequence of weather. You’re aware of enormous human sufferings at the hands of others, and you say, “Where is God?” You ask, you question, the reality of God, but all of those energies that seem to be in conflict belong to a wave like the waves of the sea. There is an energy, there is a direction, there is a shape, there is a destination to the currents.

It requires of each of you a faith that the conflicts that you feel, the concerns you have are actually a part of the totality of God’s love. Pain is no pleasure for anyone, but it is God’s love, it is God’s creation that brought each of you and those you love and know and many whom you have no awareness of toward a particular point in which your individual energy is in some conflict on the surface with the energy of something else.

When you face illness, you perceive the conflict as illness, but the energies surrounding an illness are also part of what is created by God. The cells in the body, the nerves, the tissues, the organs all belong to the process of creation.

As we look upon creation as a complete entity of itself, we see these processes actually in harmony. You may have choppy waters in the ocean, but despite the turmoil you see, there is a direction of current. There is a connection between the water and the wind. There is a connection between the wind and magnetic fields. There is a connection between magnetic fields and the earth and the moon, with magnetic fields of other bodies in the firmament.

All is actually the same unit, and you must have faith that God is present, and that even in the sense of loss, even in the fear, even in the pain, those are waves on the surface that nevertheless belong to the same current, and it is the current of God’s continuing creation. God gives each of you the strength, the openness to feel that no matter what you experience, you are part of that current. You belong to the current. You belong to God. All belong together.

Have faith that God is responding. Have faith in your ability to recognize that response, your ability ultimately to see the current, and to find peace in knowing you are never alone, that you are a part of the flow of God’s energy through All That Is, and that ultimately the destination of All That Is is peace and harmony, balance and love. You are part of that peace. You belong to the balance. You sing with harmony, and you radiate with love.

Amen.