Difference between requests and prayers.

March 28, 2023

Each of you is indeed a part of the God to whom you pray. You wonder how best to pray when there is not a parent/child relationship between God and humankind. You can use whatever terms you wish in prayer. There is no one way to pray, and equally there is no wrong way to pray. You may pray for something, and yet the impact of that prayer will be directed elsewhere, but that is okay. 

You are not being asked to pray in a particular format which is the only appropriate and meaningful method. Prayer is nothing more than openness. Prayer is an opening of your heart’s vision. Prayer is opening your awareness of God’s presence. Prayer is becoming more open to your guides. Prayer is only a commitment to the importance of being fully open to all that surrounds you. We mean indeed all—people to whom you feel close, those who seem to represent an opposing pathway, being open to nature, being open to all that is involved in interacting with others. 

Every exchange you have with others carries with it a sense of being complete or incomplete, being affirming or unaffirming, of being positive or negative, of being supporting or threatening. There are countless layers to this openness, but all that you pray for ultimately comes down to being open. 

You pray for health, and you may have specific criteria in mind, but true health flourishes far beyond the criteria that you identify, for true health is health of spirit and not just health of body and mind. True health is being truly receptive. True health is being truly committed to what is beneficial for others, for what it means to be loving. True health is an acknowledgment of the warmth of what it means to be loved. Health is a matter of balance, for it is a means of receiving strength, strength for the journey ahead, strength in one’s commitment to the presence of the loving creative spirit that you refer to as God. 

When you pray for peace, it takes on many forms. It is not unusual that such peace you pray for is done in the presence of what you perceive to be opposing that peace, what you feel prevents that peace from reaching all. Despite the different definitions of peace, whether physical, emotional, political, personal, there must be ultimately some recognition that what seems to be working against the peace you seek actually belongs in its way to a resolution that you feel must be ultimately achieved. 

The progress of love, the progress of heart vision, varies in its intensity, but its ultimate course is clear, and that objective is a manifestation of love as identified and defined in countless ways.

You pray because you seek. You seek something in your life that does not seem to be fulfilled. That something may impact you personally, or it may impact others whom you know or know of. Your prayers are in themselves acts of love, for they are offered with hope. They are offered with intention, with commitment, with care, and they are offered always in love. That is all that is needed for prayer, for you are praying for your openness. You are praying for the openness of others. When the vision is opened, the path becomes clearer, and a sense of purpose is enhanced. When the heart is open, you may not know the answers to all of your questions, but you know in principle the direction to be pursued. 

Those answers that you seek, those resolutions that you pray for will be made apparent to you either in a form that is easily recognized at the moment or something that is acknowledged more gradually upon reflection. What was the meaning of that person in my life? Was there significance in the kindness that was offered? Is God speaking to me through the actions and intentions and words of others? When I feel alone, can I still know that I am not alone? These are the kinds of realities that are behind all kinds of prayer. 

There is no prayer that is unanswered. There may be requests that are unfulfilled, but there is a difference between the request and the prayer. A request has conditions; prayer is for openness. If you truly pray to be open, you will be open. If you pray for insight and understanding, you will be open to achieve that. If you pray for peace, you will be open to recognize the true peace that is present. 

It is understandable that human beings pray for specific outcomes whether personal or collective, regardless of the kind of outcome. Those prayers are often with conditions, and when it appears those conditions are not being met, it is easy to surmise that you didn’t deserve the prayer being fulfilled or that there was no one to hear that prayer. In other words, “there is no God, because if there were a God, my prayer would be answered.” Such prayers miss the point. 

Each of you in the ways you reach out to the reality of God frequently miss the point. You forget that prayer is about openness and not condition. Certainly, when you have grave concerns about an issue, you want to see those concerns alleviated. You want to see resolution, but you often find yourselves looking in one direction for that resolution when that resolution is already present if you but look elsewhere. 

All that you truly pray for, not just all conditions that you pray with, but all that you deeply pray for is with you, is at hand, is present. You are empowered to see that presence, to feel that presence, to know it is there, and to be warmed by it. But seeing that presence is by no means automatic, and there is no true reality that such presence can be identified within the restrictions of those conditions of prayer. If you are concerned about the health of another, of course it is good to imagine good health, to image good outcomes, to send out energies that are positive and supportive, but the fact that you are praying on behalf of another is indicative of your opening your heart vision to another.

Look fully around you to recognize that the true meaning of that prayer is present and is fulfilled. It is fulfilled not because God responds in action to your request. It is fulfilled because God’s presence is more clearly felt. There is a warmth of acknowledgment that at some level the loving presence of the creative energy that gives life is with you and with those for whom you pray. 

Life of the spirit is a life of prayer. When you pray for openness, you are giving life to your spirit, your soul. You are giving meaning to that life, purpose and shape, and in so doing, your own path complements that shape and direction. Your personal pathway then coincides with the path of spirit. 

You are asked to be loving. You’re not asked to be fully love. That is the goal, of course, but it is not a goal that is fully achieved in human form. To become love, you must first be loved, and then you must be loving. Human life is designed with the objective of becoming more loving. For those who experience multiple human lives, each life becomes more truly loving until at the end, all spirits are only love. God’s presence expands through your becoming more loving. 

It is not some unspoken expectation that you must become love or you have failed. No human being, and we reiterate no human being, becomes fully love with no room for anything else. The spiritual leaders in history who formed an approach to God were never fully love. There is no perfection; there is great insight. There are those who have been outstanding teachers who have devoted themselves to heart vision, but they themselves were not fully love while in human form. 

There is no reason for people to feel guilt in what they appear to see as being against pathways of love. There is no reason for shame for anyone to acknowledge the value of becoming more loving and yet recognize much in their lives that is not so. That difference between what you seek and how you see yourself is not grounds for judgment, either of yourself or others. As we have said so often, your lives are journeys, and each pathway has its own nature, its own twists and turns. No two paths are the same. No two paths must be the same, and yet all paths eventually carry the spirit to perfect love. 

We are on our own journey as guides. We learn from our work with one another. We learn in our interactions with human life. We learn in our interactions with other forms of knowing life. We can say in truth that many guides illuminate the paths of knowing lifeforms in universes that are beyond your awareness. Those universes have different dimensions, different ways of organization, different ways of interaction, different forces at work. The universe you know has its own limitations, its own restrictions, its own character. Scientists continue to gain an understanding, but the true universe is infinitely more complicated than can be fully understood. It is so with all universes. 

Our spirits’ presence as guides, therefore, spans universes far different from your own. We are aware of these realities, and there is no expectation that you should also be so aware. You exist on your path. You exist on your earth. The God of creation is a God of all universes and all that is contained within them. Regardless of which universe a spirit entity thrives in, all spirits belong to one another. All spirits belong to the Creator and to all that is. 

There is a logic of sorts to these universes, and that logic is not a logic of physics or chemistry or any of the sciences you know. It is simply a logic of spirit presence. That presence in your universe is identified as love, for that is a concept that you can understand, but there are other kinds of logic that belong to the Creator that are shared with all that exist. Our growth as spirit guides is one of becoming more open in our vision to these expanded realities that exist in so many different ways. 

You are loved because all are loved. You have pathways because all have pathways. There are pathways for all life, human or not. There are pathways of all that exists in your universe, and there are pathways for each universe. All of these pathways share a common destiny, that being becoming fully love. Be not intimidated or feel belittled when we speak of the magnitude of creation, for that is not our aim. We wish merely for you to understand that you are essential to the presence of all that is love everywhere. You belong to all that is created, and you therefore belong to all that is love. 

Be comforted in your awareness of the grandeur that you label as God, for you are an important part of that grandeur. You belong and all belong and all participate in that presence of God everywhere. 

Be warmed by love. 

Be illuminated by love. 

Be inspired to become love. 

Amen.