June 13, 1988

• Receiving and extending inner peace

God's peace is indeed with each of you. God’s peace is never removed from your activities throughout your life, but for you to sense that peace, you must allow yourselves time to center in and to quiet down. Acquiring God's peace is not just a matter of blindly allowing it to enter your soul. It means active participation as well. Yes, you must participate in order to have peace. God's will in the world requires action, but so does God’s peace.

What is it that you must do to achieve peace? You must first of all be willing to recognize what concerns you for what it really is. Are you worried about the future? Do you worry about the past? Are you concerned more about what others think than about who you really are? You must be willing to organize the priorities in your life in order to identify what is indeed important. Most often what you worry about in reality is not of great significance. Likewise, it is often those issues of great significance that occupy little of your thoughts.

To achieve peace, you must place life's activities and influences into a realistic perspective. Such a prioritizing is not done once and then forgotten. It is a continual process through which you guide the direction of your own life's activities. But having reached a state of clear vision concerning what is important and what is only additional baggage, you are more able to deal with your sense of anxieties or restlessness. When you recognize what is important and your response to it, you can then actively turn toward God, opening yourself to a sense of peace brought about by a recognition that it is you who are in control and not the event.

The source of much concern in humanity is a feeling that one is out of control, that somehow something can occur of which you have little understanding or capacity to cope. By recognizing what is important, you are moving one step closer to exercising control over your own response to external events, decisions, activities, and the like. God's peace is really the result of your confidence in dealing with life on a level you choose to be of high priority. Too often you lose focus to your inner peace by worrying about elements in life which are relatively insignificant. By recognizing the insignificance of those elements, you diminish the unsettling influence they have upon your lives. It is through your knowledge of God's presence and function within life that you are ultimately able to set your lives into realistic perspective.

There are many things that happen during human life which you cannot hope to control, nor is it important that you do control them. For those things that you cannot control and those things that there is no need to control, there is no need for concern. Worry, therefore, has no place. If your relationships with others occupy a major place of importance in your lives, then God's peace is directed more properly towards an increase in the depth and effectiveness of that relationship. But you cannot hope to employ God's peace unless you can properly direct its course.

Peace within enables you to express and act on love from the outside. It is peace which is the source of strength. It is love which puts that strength to action. You cannot experience peace without love, and you cannot experience and exercise love without peace. They both belong together. But first must come peace, and that peace is achieved through the recognition of God's love, through the acknowledgment of that love. It is not sufficient merely to say, "I know that God is love, and that God is therefore always present." You must feel it. You must be assured of it through your own experiences. An individual cannot explain to another what love is. An individual may only demonstrate that love.

The emptiness that much of humankind feels stems in large part from a lack of an ability to recognize God's love. And yet despite hearing of the importance and reality of God’s love, so few actually sense it. There are many organizations which promote the fact of God's presence as a loving presence throughout humanity. You cannot escape life without hearing about it, and yet its impact is much diminished when one considers the numbers of people who are fully committed to that recognition in comparison with those who have been told of that presence.

In order for God's love to be effective, it must be experienced—not merely talked about, not merely heard of by way of others. Experiencing God's love varies from person to person and from one life's experience to another. The same individual can experience God's love directly one moment and feel isolated the next. It is never a constant feeling. It is never a constant recognition on a personal level. But for you to be successful in working with God's peace, for working within God's peace, you must experience first hand God’s love and presence.

We suggest that you search for events within your lives that point directly to God’s presence. It may be a brief moment. It may be over an extended period of time. But you must find some confirming evidence that gives credence to your belief in God's presence. It is the events that you remember, that you can particularly identify, which then in turn serve to strengthen your conviction of God's presence. It is through that conviction that you ultimately experience peace, and it is out of that peace that you are able to express love to others and to work actively as a reflection of God within the experience of humankind.

Yes, there is much to do in life in order to bring God's peace to many others. Proximity itself is no guarantee of the transmission of peace from one to another. Two people may share a life together for many years, and yet never experience any inner peace. There are family members who are greatly separated by distance who somehow contribute actively to each others' peace—that inner peace that you all seek. So distance or proximity is not the ultimate determinant of the success or failure in providing peace to another.

What is the means by which you afford inner peace the opportunity of spreading to another? It is through prayer. Prayer is the only way that one can give peace to another. You can reflect peace by feeling peace when in the presence of another, but the peace you feel is not transmitted directly. When you are in the presence of one with peace, you recognize it, but it cannot be communicated completely in a shared means between two individuals.

If you wish for another to achieve peace, you must ultimately pray for another. Prayer has the ability of opening the soul of another to the peace of those around that person. If you feel inner peace and pray that another be given such peace, it is likely that the peace you feel may be communicated directly. That communication only takes place within the presence of prayerful consideration.

It is not enough merely to be prayerful and in the presence of another who needs peace. The missing ingredient is always prayer. You pray for the health of others, and of course you pray that others may be given peace. But perhaps you understand more fully the importance of that prayer on behalf of another in order that such peace be transmitted and communicated toward another.

We, your guides, are aware of your search for peace. We certainly feel peace. But the fact that we are your guides and we experience peace does not automatically lead to your thereby experiencing such peace. That is accomplished through our prayers, and also most importantly, through the prayers of other humans.

You are bound very close to one another. That union is prayer. The power of that prayer you are only beginning to understand. It is broad, it is all inclusive, and it is without any problems of restriction or weakness. It is totally powerful and absolutely beneficial in every sense. The best that you can pray on behalf of another is for their peace. When you pray for someone's health, you pray for their peace, for if they have peace, they can deal with illness. If they can deal with illness, that illness ceases to hold a grip on that individual. It may be present physically, but it no longer binds the soul into inactivity. It is peace therefore that provides the freedom to live as God would wish you to live.

Our prayers for you and for all souls in human form are centered on peace above all else. So often we close blessing you with God's peace, for it is that peace that provides the soil for the growth of love and all that emanates from love. Our prayers are indeed for your peace. Our prayers are for your continued spiritual growth which takes place so effectively with peace. When you are challenged almost beyond your ability to endure, we pray that you may be given peace in order to endure.

Our love for you is a reflection of God's love for you. It is eternal, and it is through the love we offer you that you receive the peace you seek and are then in turn able to pass on that love and to expand and strengthen the presence of peace throughout the earth.

Although in a relatively short time you will be temporarily separated from one another, we see you joined again in this group, continuing your search for peace and a sense of direction in your lives for the years to come. We rejoice in this association of souls and bless you, each of you, with God's healing light and loving presence.

Amen.