At war with yourself.
May 5, 1984
You are all joined with God in a very intense manner at this moment in your lives. There are times when each of you has very special and poignant needs. It is at times like the present that the potential for growth is so great.
You are all united through the common experience of being a part of these messages. How often it is that when you are few in number, you are stronger in your willingness to be open, in your willingness to ask for help. There is a reason that your group remains small through the years. It is difficult for many to be candid unless a feeling of absolute trust is present. It is easier to be more intimate in the expression of what lies within when you are few in number. There have been occasions when you have met as a collection of two or three souls, and the feeling is always closer and more intense. It is not to suggest that you should limit yourselves to four or five, but God does not intend that your gatherings be large in comparison to the present.
Your lives are quite different from one another—the demands, the frustrations, the responsibilities, the pace, your backgrounds, your families—all are so diverse, and yet, when you gather to listen to God, the diversity is gone, and you become as one. The sense of unity, coupled with the sense of trust and love, provides the environment for supporting one another, responding to one another through resonance with God.
We see your lives moving forward according to God’s desires. You will achieve a personal sense of self fulfillment and a recognition of self-worth, but such developments do not occur quickly. Above all, you must be willing to nurture patience, for it is in establishing such patience that you will develop the composure to intensify your receptivity to God.
Patience is a quality too often missing from each of your lives. You all want what is best—what you perceive to be rightly yours, whether or not it is what God would wish. Anxieties are created by the sense of self—inability to achieve goals which have been identified. When you become impatient with yourselves or impatient with others, you are simply acknowledging that there is a gap between where you are or others are, and where you or they ought to be according to your own perception.
God is never impatient. You must also learn never to be impatient. The greatest impatience is impatience toward oneself, not impatience directed to others. Impatience toward others is judgmental. Impatience toward oneself is destructive. You are who you are. You will never be what you are not.
Essential to the establishment of patience is the acceptance of who you are. It is one matter to accept who you are. It is quite another to know who you are. Life is a kind of unfolding, a rolling away of the shrouds which camouflage who you are. As the years progress, you become more aware of who you really are, but regardless of the degree of your awareness, you can always, at any time in your development, accept who you are. God has given each of you a purpose, an identity, and although you may not be fully aware of its nature, you must accept its truth. If you accept who you are, you are accepting God’s presence in you. You may not be fully aware of the depth of your reality, but you must accept the worth of your reality. When you fully accept that you are who you are, that you have true worth, that you are in part divine—that divinity establishing your value—then you have traveled far along the road to self-patience.
With that patience ultimately comes peace within. The result of inner peace is knowledge and understanding. You cannot grow in understanding if you are at war with yourself. One nation does not grow in its acceptance or understanding of another if it is continually at war with it. You learn more about a nation through peace than through war. You learn more about yourselves through peace than through conflict.
One of you alluded to this in part when she said that she can go back and read messages but that she is so full of turmoil within that she cannot focus upon them for long. That is absolutely correct, and it applies ultimately to the final recognition of one’s value—that all humans are important. But neither is it easy when you are filled with inner conflict to recognize that you as an individual are really important. You are instructed to seek inner peace. Through that peace comes understanding, but to achieve that peace, you must first accept yourselves. If you cannot accept yourselves as you are, how can you reach any sense of inner peace, for you will always be dissatisfied, and dissatisfaction shields out peace?
Patience with self and the acceptance of oneself leads to patience directed outward toward the acceptance of others. You know you must accept others, but if you cannot accept yourselves, how can you possibly be accepting of another? You pay the instruction mere lip service. You acknowledge the need to accept others, but you cannot fully accept them. Much of what you gain through these messages is the recognition of the need for something—the need for acceptance, the need for patience, the need for love, the need for service—but recognizing that need is not the same as accepting and loving and serving. Those are the goals. They are not merely the lessons. Your lives must therefore be geared toward the activation of those goals and not just the knowledge, the need for them.
Certainly there are many around you who are not even aware of the need, but that is not your path in life—to become aware. Through these messages you already know what you must be aware of. You are challenged by that each time you meet and open yourselves to God’s word. In life you need to serve, to love, to accept. These are active commitments, not intellectual ones.
There are many who profess faith in God. There are precious few who have such faith. Ministers may preach to the members of their church about the urgency for a particular action that is offered in the name of God, but they themselves may be totally unable to initiate that action within their own lives. Their position is one of showing the way to others, not traveling that way and bidding others to join them.
What we, your guides who are with you at this moment, wish to impress upon you is the difference between recognizing and acting, between statement and action. We can provide you with the statement of objectives, but it is you who must act upon them. It is you who bring the recognition of what is to be done to the level of actually functioning. Our responsibilities as your guides are ultimately to show God’s chosen path, but we cannot walk that path for you. You must yourselves travel upon it accompanied by us. We travel with you. We serve to help you over the rough spots in the road, but it is really you who move along it. God’s light illuminates your path if you wish to see it. You may see it and choose not to move toward it but to try another route. That is your choice. We help focus God’s illumination upon your lives. We help you to see the road before you. These messages provide the map by which you negotiate your lives, but you must translate the markings in the map into action.
Love one another, yes, but first of all love yourselves, for in loving yourself you will know the benefit of peace and insight and strength, and will draw from that well in your love of another. Achieve peace within first, and your lives will carry greater focus. Truly accept yourselves as creatures of God, as containers of God’s spirit, as stewards of this divinity. Don’t measure your place in life with the perspective of some perception of where you think you ought to be. That only leads to frustration, bitterness, impatience, and turmoil.
You are who you are, and you are where you are because of God’s grace. No one can be impatient with that grace, for none question a gift from God. It is accepted as a gift of love. It is never questioned. Accept your lives as a gift of God’s love, and any sense of frustration and anxiety will disappear completely.
God’s peace is your peace. God’s strength is your strength. God’s love is for you to love. God’s acceptance is for you to be accepting. Be grateful for the blessing of life, and be thankful that God has provided you with a means of accepting that life.
Amen.