September 8, 1991

• The role of faith in the approaching death of loved ones

God is joined at this time with each of your guides and with the light and strength of each of your souls.

Each of you has expressed in some form or another concerns about life, concerns about those who are preparing in their way to join us. In short, your concerns relate to the continuity of life. Each of you has faith that there is a life after human existence, but your faith is often an intellectual faith and too seldom an emotional one.

You must accept that the swings between intellectualism and emotionalism, if you wish to call it that, are true of all who share the experience of human life. There are times when you can easily affirm your conviction that life on our side indeed exists, and there are other times when that conviction wavers. Regardless of where you are in this cycle of faith, each of you has concerns for those who are close who are near the end of their current human journey.

Why must the suffering continue? Why must a diminished form of life continue? Why can't one be allowed to move onward? These questions come to the core both of your understanding of human life and your perception of a form of existence outside of human life. Few people have an internalized awareness of their own lives prior to birth. As a result, it is most difficult to fully grasp the beauty and potential which lie before you and those whom you love beyond human life. We try to direct your understanding toward a deeper faith in what lies before you, but we also know from our own experience in human form that our understanding of that future was minuscule at best.

Each of you in your own way is being asked to live by faith. Faith is supported by knowledge but not substituted by it, for if you know something to be true, what need is there for faith? It is through the development of your souls that your faith strengthens.

The faith we are talking about is not some kind of detached belief. It is a firm emotional conviction felt from deep within you. It is a conviction which is not based on easy to see truths. There are no concrete proofs. There is only evidence, and that evidence can only be regarded from the distance of faith rather than from the proximity of absolute knowledge.

You live to grow in faith. Your growth in faith is achieved through the challenge of life and what life brings. For each of you this is different. For some it is an inner turmoil about self. For others it is a turmoil regarding the experience of other, but it must unmistakably come from a challenge of one kind or another. You grow in faith ultimately because faith provides the only grounds for truly understanding where you are at this moment, where others are at this moment.

If there were no life beyond human form, life would ultimately become meaningless. There would be no purpose except to exist and to collect whatever one wishes to collect with the belief that all that has been gathered would be eventually lost. Life without meaning provides only a sense of great loss and despair. Ultimately you are brought to a place in your lives where you have no other choice but to have faith in the future and to allow that faith to provide meaning to the present.

Fear of the infirmities of age which has been expressed comes from a lack of conviction—Internal conviction—In the substantive continuation of life in the spirit form.

We have not left behind all that we experienced in human life. We are not separated from family or friends or beauty or love. We are even closer to these now than we were in human life. Human life contains barriers to the total appreciation of all that has been created. From our plane those barriers have been eliminated, and life for us is still more beautiful, more meaningful, more relevant, more permanent, more brilliant. The transition from human life-form to spiritual life-form is different for all people, but that transition must be made and the journey is ultimately a glorious one.

Those for whom you pray who await transformation into a new life are growing spiritually. They are developing. Their lives as they live them do have a purpose and you must have faith in this. As your acceptance of life beyond human life grows, your tolerance for whatever others go through in the transition will become stronger and deeper.

You are all on a continuous path of life. There is nothing which you hold dear to you which is of importance that you will fully relinquish. That which has meaning and value to you and which also nurtures the soul will remain with you forever. This we know and this you must have faith in. Life is full of challenges and questions, doubts and fears, full of events which ask you why and which try your patience. All of this provides sustenance for your spiritual growth if you wish to accept it, and it's that growth which will provide a deeper sense of beauty in life and a stronger conviction in its continuity.

We rejoice that you are again gathered together. We rejoice in our assembly of your guides. It is a time of great beauty and strength, all warmed through the brilliance of God's light surrounding you and us. And we bless your lives with that glorious light.

Amen.