Do what helps all people.
April 10, 2018
It is God who speaks to each of you. God’s voice can be deafening in its quiet, in its solitude. God’s voice can be deafening in its patience, in its love. There are many voices of God. There are many who speak and act and pray and listen as voices of God.
You want to hear God. You want to see God’s presence. You want to know fully God’s presence, but God’s voice does not come down as a thunderbolt from heaven. Rather, God’s voice can be heard in the wind through the grass. God’s voice is felt. It is not heard with the ears. God’s voice is not understood with the intellect but is known rather through the heart, the spirit.
Each of you knows God. All human beings know God, even those who are bent on a rejection of God’s presence. There are scientists and artists and thinkers of all persuasions who disagree and postulate on whether God exists at all, and if so, then how does one know for sure.
We, who are your guides, know even more intimately than you know yourselves of your concerns about human life, the existence and flourishing of community. We know of your anxiety about what it means to have an impact on others, and how that impact can be a positive energy. We know your thoughts about the needs for peace even before you express them openly.
That sense of peace—lack of anxiety, lack of worry, lack of suffering—is part of what makes up all human beings. It is the Center that you spoke of. It is the glue that belongs to part of the strands that unite you. You wonder what can be done in the face of seeming overwhelming odds to bring about a stronger acceptance of God and human lives. You wonder how one finds equilibrium, balance, and peace in the midst of so much turmoil. That turmoil, whether personal, military, political, or interrelationships, is always painful to observe and even more painful to experience.
Human life will always have such challenges that seem to be elevated to existential questions, not merely insignificant actions or temporary viewpoints. What can you do to find Center in what you see and feel as utter chaos? We could suggest to you simply that you have faith, faith that somehow God will intervene, that God will step in and right the wrongs that you are aware of. But a simple solution like that, the intervention of God brought about simply by prayer for such interaction, into action with human beings, does not serve to resolve what is really happening. God does not suddenly enter a room and all becomes light. For God’s presence to be truly evident, it is not that God intervenes. It is that you collectively intervene.
What form of intervention is appropriate? Each event, each challenge, each seemingly cataclysmic event, does not just have a single response that is needed. Each event has particular responses that are appropriate. You struggle to know what is best. How can you intervene? How can you find balance where it appears there is none? How can you find reason prevailing when your views seem to insist that there is no prevailing of reason?
The intervention that we speak of has many forms, but there is one thing in common with all meaningful intervention as a reflection of God, and that is its intentional qualities. If you are intentional in the way that you try to intervene in intemperance, injustice, or threats of one kind or another, the intentional component essentially means your own engagement, but it has many expressions. You can be intentionally engaged within a setting that is prayerful. You can be intentionally engaged as you write, as you speak, as you ponder what reflects God. There is much that you can do that is intentional without being passive, for even prayer is not passive. Prayer requires energy. Prayer requires a giving up of who you are so that you can become something far more purposeful.
You do not have to be at the front of a protest in order to be intentional. Whatever you do, it is essential that it be devoted to what helps all people, not what helps your country or your community or yourself. Yes, your country, your community, and your very self have value and deserve to be protected, nurtured, and strengthened, but it is in the larger sense in your embracing all human beings that the intentionality of love, of concern, of listening, of being present takes on the greatest significance, the greatest potential to be a voice of God.
What do you listen for when you wish to hear the voice of God? You will always know what the best path to pursue is. That knowledge is not because of specific training. That knowledge is because of being open to others. You serve others by being open far more than you serve others by telling them in words what must or can be done. Knowing there is a God is really a matter of your own openness, your willingness to embrace what can’t be seen and yet, in its way, can be measured.
God’s voice is the voice of commitment. When you feel committed to whatever it is that benefits others, that is a voice of God. It is a voice of intentional as well as committed efforts. One is not exclusive of the other, for being intentional you are committed to what is important. You cannot find commitment, true commitment, without the intentional component.
If you want to see God, you must be God. We don’t imply this in any way that is against God’s teachings. If you want to see God, you must be God. If you want to see God, you must commit yourself toward what it is that is godly, that is loving, that is forgiving, that is being committed to what benefits all.
We have frequently said each of you is a part of God, and that is an absolute truth. You are very much a part of God, but God is many things, and you belong to a portion of all that God is. And even though you may not act godly in a particular situation, you are in a real sense God, for you can act as God’s hands, eyes, ears, voice. If you want to see God, observe yourself in the reflection of a mirror. That mirror does not have to be a physical mirror, but any kind of mirror that prompts you to look at yourselves with honesty and with an acknowledgment that all life is a search. You look in the mirror of life and you see a manifestation of God.
You live, and because of you, God lives. It is equally true that because God lives, you live. God is an infinite collection of “yous,” whether the you is male or female, whether the you originates in one place or another. Regardless of how you may appear, you are all what becomes the entity of God. We say God Is, and therefore You Are. We have also said with equal veracity that because You Are, God Is. It is because you are committed, it is because you are intentional, in whatever way is appropriate for you, that God is.
God does not live in a place far away. God does not live in an environment that needs a translator in order for you to be heard. There is no need for intercessors in your relationship with God. There are those who can help facilitate your openness to God, but no one has the power and authority to activate God for their particular agenda at the expense of others. It simply does not exist.
Accept that you are God. Accept that you have within you the capability of being committed, of being intentional as you face so many challenges in the world having an impact that may affect all human beings. You can act. You can serve God. You can serve as God. You can act as God. You can pray as God. You can love as you understand the meaning of God’s love. It is first by hearing God that you find the grounds for that commitment.
Listen to God’s voice, for it is speaking. It is speaking now. It is speaking always. It is speaking in the wind. It is speaking in the waves. It is speaking in the songs of birds in the morning. God’s voice is speaking in the sunshine, in the rain. God’s voice is always speaking. Open your hearts. Be willing to hear God’s voice everywhere.
Be committed to being a voice of God. Be intentional in all ways as a true reflection of the God you see in the mirror. It is reason to rejoice even in the midst of fear and anxiety, for you each hear God. Be courageous. Be faithful. Be the God that you truly are. It is then God’s peace that becomes your peace, and it is your peace that becomes the peace of others. Each in their own way joins in the chorus of God’s voice. Listen…listen.
Amen.