Ask for God’s peace.

December 8, 1985

God’s guidance is a gift you all share, for God is always with you. You must remember that guidance is not an event which takes place on an occasional basis. It occurs not just at moments like these. 

If you are to receive real peace, you can only receive it when you are open, when you are ready. God’s peace is with you at all times, but it only becomes yours with the asking. God is like a physician outside the door to a sickroom. God can help, but cannot unless invited to. All of you are particularly active in various ways, but you must make an effort to welcome God’s guidance, to invite God’s help to be a part of these activities. Peace can be achieved with an intensity that blocks out all frustrations, anxiety, and worry. Each of you is able to draw upon such peace, receiving it with that intensity. 

The world requires peace. When you think of world peace, you think first of military peace, but that is the least important kind. The most important peace and the most difficult to achieve is inner peace. When you are at peace within, you can be at peace with your neighbor, you can be at peace with the world. So much energy is devoted to the expression of concern of military armaments. It is true, there is great danger, but the solution in the end, the long-term solution, can only be achieved when individuals accept their own sufficiency, accept their adequacy, accept their sense of self-worth. They become at peace with themselves because they see themselves encompassed by God’s light. 

When you are at peace, when you are not anxious, when you are not dissatisfied, when you do not feel greed or jealousy or anger or self-righteousness, then you are not motivated to control others. A country is not motivated then to control another country or to acquire more land, more wealth, more power. The expression in life of “peace achieved within” is the avoidance of those qualities. When those qualities are missing, peace in the world may be achieved. There is no need for military armaments. There is no need for political pressuring, dominance, or influence. 

We speak in essence of a kind of utopia, for it is not in the nature of humans to be void of all of these feelings we spoke of. That is part of what it means to be human. Your growth is achieved through a kind of chipping away of those negative attributes belonging to human life. Indeed, it is a lifetime occupation, and you will never fully achieve that goal, but your efforts to move in that direction will influence the efforts of others to be so moved. It is in the trying, it is in the effort to grow that the potential for peace is raised—world peace, we speak of here. 

Faith is the central element for achieving that peace. It must also be said that your faith can be likened to an ocean. The amount of water remains relatively constant, but the tides shift the volume from place to place. One sees an apparent decrease in the water through the ebbing of a tide or the increase of the flow. The truth is that the water does not decrease. It shifts but does not disappear.

Such is it with faith. You build up a reservoir of faith that provides you with the strength to see you through all of your days. There are times in your lives when you have less faith or more faith. The faith does not diminish. It changes in focus, it is altered by demands placed upon it, but it does not wither. It is never reduced, but what you must seek in your lives is a recognition of the fact that faith, although the product of your efforts, is a gift from God. 

There are those who experience high levels of faith in action and others whose experience is greatly less. God does not choose to provide the gift of faith in greater supply to one than to another. That gift is the same for all. You must learn, however, to reduce the shifting back and forth between greater and smaller levels, as you perceive them. Those perceived levels must be established. They must remain at a constant level. They must be given the semblance of peace—not rising and falling, but a steadiness. 

Your capacity for love is governed in the same way. All people have the same potential for expressing love. All have the same potential for receiving love, but for some the levels seem to change almost daily. You certainly have experienced events in your lives which promote your desire to express love more fully than at other times. Likewise, events have occurred that made you want to reduce the love you can offer out of anger, perhaps, or frustration or defensiveness—there are many reasons. But such changes in feelings do not mean that for one day you have a lot of love to give and other days very little. The love you have to give to others remains constant. That is the gift which God provides to all. If you can see the reality of this vision of love, perhaps it is easier to accept the reality of such a vision of faith. 

When you pray to God, pray for an ability to smooth out the variances in your perception of your own faith. Pray for the ability to recognize the abundance of faith which God has given. As we said before, God does not play favorites. There are none who have greater faith than others. There are none who can offer greater love than others. The potential is equal for all people. 

As you proceed through your lives, seek out opportunities which call for you to raise your perception of God’s gift of faith, to raise your perception of God’s gift of your offering of love. There are those who express less faith, who express less love. Reach out to them and try to fill some of that void by increasing your own faith, your own love. 

Whenever you feel you have less to give, that is precisely the moment to give more. When you are dejected, seek out opportunities for providing joy to another. When you feel depressed, see opportunities for offering hope to another. When you feel lost in some manner, seek ways of providing guidance to another. Each of these ways of response helps to even out the differences that you normally perceive in your levels of faith and love. Through such efforts will come a steadier sense of inner peace.

We pray for your ability to find such equilibrium resulting in peace. We pray that you will recognize when God presents you with opportunities to give when you have little to give, to provide comfort when you lack comfort, to provide love when you feel unloved, to provide faith when you feel a lack. Our prayers are for that strength, for that evenness. Our prayers are for your continued growth and sense of purpose, a sense of self-respect and a desire to provide for others. 

We bless you with God’s peace, with God’s faith, with God’s love. 

Amen.