Allowing others to be.
September 19, 1992
The power and light of God strengthens your souls through brilliance and warmth and love. Contrary to the belief of many, God is not a passive force. It happens so often that individuals say, "If there was a God, He would not have allowed this to happen." The truth of the matter is that because there is a God, things are allowed to happen.
There is an orderliness to the universe, but there is also a randomness. Things happen because they happen, not because they have been ordained to occur. Whether you think of personal tragedies or national calamities, events occur because God allows them. If it were God’s desire to prevent them, such prevention would be witnessed. If events which create turmoil are prevented, then humans would obviously be unaware of the potential for crisis and would be equally unchallenged to meet whatever befalls them. As a result humans would also have a limited sense of God being an active presence in life.
One becomes aware of God, not by God’s preventing occurrences, but by providing the strength for appropriate responses to what happens. God is present and active through the strength given you to deal with what life brings you.
So it can be for you acting as a representative, a hand of God. You can become active in a positive, meaningful, constructive way by enabling others to deal with issues that confront them, not merely by removing those issues or pretending that they do not exist. It is an exercise of love on your part not to remove a challenge, but to help enable the challenge to be met in a way which is spiritually appropriate. That is what God does for humans and that is what you can do as well for others.
The temptation being a parent is to eliminate the obstacles to make the road ahead smooth, void of any danger. If you were to be successful in such an endeavor, your children would not develop the skills of coping with challenge. Becoming an adult encompasses experiences learned as a child handling challenges, disappointments, yes, even mistakes. By taking away the challenge you remove the potential for that growth.
This very much describes the loving relationship between God and all humans. God does not send difficulty your way. God does not prevent challenges, difficulties, frustrations, disappointments, pain from entering your lives, but God does provide you the source of strength to deal with them. Referring back to the vision of a rock in a stream, being passive, being receptive does not mean being totally inactive or useless or without purpose. You can have a beneficial effect on another by reinforcing the other's confidence in dealing with issues of the moment. It does not mean telling another what to do, but it is rather an empowering of another to cope, to persevere, to endure and get through. You are aware of difficulties that others experience and you are supporting their ability to gain insight. But you are not dominating that response, you are not dictating it, you are not removing the obstacles. You are merely empowering another.
This act of empowering another is an act of love. Anything you can do which provides another with a sense of self-respect and confidence—not arrogance, but confidence—is acting through love which reflects the relationship of God to humankind. Your empowering of another is a reflection of the divine spark that you share. It is not a dominating influence. It is not a dictating influence. It does not prescribe or limit or threaten. It empowers, it enables in a positive sense. It also respects the randomness of life with no desire to eradicate the unpredictability of human existence.
God could certainly have arranged creation to follow unbreakable laws. The result would have been total predictability, but with total predictability, where is the chance to grow? You go from one point which you are familiar with to another that you anticipate in its entirety and there is no growth—there is only motion. You live your lives to grow, not merely to be active. When that growth is positive it is because of your interaction with uncertainty. It is through that interaction that your souls gain strength and perspective, depth and sensitivity. That is the real payoff of human life. You become more loving because you learn to be sensitive. It is this lovingness that emulates the love of God and reflects it and disseminates it throughout creation.
You are all in positions where you are faced with others in need, be it spiritual, personal, financial, emotional, whatever. There are needs crying out to be met. To respond as the hand of God you must respond lovingly. Such a response must be looked upon far beyond the immediate goals you seek and be viewed from the perspective of spiritual development. The goal is spiritual development and such development is achieved through one's response to challenges, through one's response to another. Compassion is of course essential, for you must feel the feelings that another experiences, but you must allow the other to respond in a way which is appropriate for that individual.
The response which is best for you may indeed be inappropriate for another. No matter how convinced you may be of its rightness, it may not be what is right for that particular soul's development. It is essential to allow another to develop as he or she must develop, not as you must develop. You influence others by allowing them to be strengthened, not by imposing your strength upon another. Love is allowing others to be who they are. Love is not changing another to become who you are. It is the granting of freedom of choice which is the ultimate expression of love.
God has granted you the freedom of choice to do as you feel you must do, to become as you feel you must become. God has not imposed a strict set of standards. Your expression of God's love, therefore, must be to allow others to be as they are supposed to be and not as you wish them to be. If you strengthen another's ability to respond, the response will be appropriate. If you take away that strength through your own imposition, whatever response another may make will be weak and perhaps dependent upon you again for confirmation of its appropriateness.
When you reach out to others in love, you are reaching out to strengthen them. God provides you with strength. It is for you to offer that strength to others. Love will not be demanding upon another. It will be accepting.
We see you in positions that provide an opportunity for strengthening another. You should be perceptive to those opportunities. You must not dictate and dominate and control. By being there, by being present in the situation nonjudgmentally, you are helping to strengthen another human being. Enter your relationships with less judgment, showing patience and respect and compassion, and you will be reflecting God's love among others who surround you.
We see your souls receptive. We see your souls wanting to know what is right. We see your souls wanting to know why your lives are as they are. You are correct that you have been richly blessed, but you have been no more richly blessed than anyone else. It is merely that you are mindful of that blessing. Those who suffer unbearable pain emotionally or physically have also been equally blessed. They have been given strength. They have been given an ability to cope, but that ability is too often clouded in self-doubt, lack of self-respect, lack of confidence, fear. There are many emotions that diminish the ability of the strength that has been given to them from being fully used. If you can remove some of those clouds, the strength which God has provided can come forward. You are then serving your fellow human beings with God's love.
We stand by you but do not change the course of your life. It is you who are empowered to create in your life what you wish created. It is we who are joined with you helping you to recognize your own strengths, your own abilities to create. It is not we who create—it is you. Just as our relationship to you is supportive and patient and never judgmental, so the continuity of that relationship can be guaranteed through your dealing with others. This is all part of God's love. God's patience in allowing us a sense of choice, our patience in allowing you a sense of choice, and your patience in allowing others an opportunity for such choice—it is all the same. It is God's love working actively but not dictating, not preordaining. There is no predetermination. No one is destined to head in one direction or another. You have all been empowered, but it is up to you to exercise that and to encourage others to do the same.
And now we bless you with the empowering love that you and we share in the presence of God's light and God's love.
Amen.