Live to expand love.
December 15, 2005
God welcomes all of you to the table of faith. You shared a great meal together, and it is at this time that you share in further nourishment, the nourishment of your souls. It is God who brings you to this table of nourishment, this opportunity to find growth, to find strength, to understand what it means to truly share with one another. It is not often in the lives of human beings that you draw up to this table and open yourselves to the blessings that belong to this experience.
Each of you is given a knowledge of the ultimate truth of God. We say you are given “a knowledge.” We do not say you are given “full knowledge,” but that will also come upon you, for your growth continues without stop, without pause, without hesitation, without lingering. All human beings experience this steady growth. It is not just you who contemplate what it means to be reflective of God on a daily basis, but for those of you who do pursue this objective, you are given great insight. Yours is the gift of the search. It is the gift of the pursuit and the growth that results from that effort. Your guides direct that pursuit for you, not because you are specially selected, but because the pursuit, the search for truth, is a common need shared by souls that accompany you on your journey.
When souls choose to return for the purpose of experiencing human life, there is an awareness of the potential that is a part of that human life. No life is fully determined or preordained, and yet every human life is provided with the same potential. How that potential, how that search, how that journey progresses is dependent upon many things. There are parts of human life outside your control that control or dictate some aspect of your experience. There are other parts of your human experience that are governed by your own choices, your own efforts, but a soul who joins the human family for a limited time, in our sense, is particularly aware of that potential that is under the control of the individual. The soul cannot predict or fully know the impact of other events in life upon the individual.
Your souls choose to be a part of your lives because of the known potential that is related to your choices. How you exercise your choice, what directions you choose in life are always up to you, but you have been given a sensitivity to the presence of your soul that helps guide you in your own choices. It is that sensitivity that souls know of when they choose to experience human life. You are given choice, but in some ways you are not fully free to exercise that choice, for that choice will be influenced by your awareness of life around you and your awareness of life within you. You are not totally free. When a soul shares your life, it is for two reasons: one, the known potential for the level of openness that individual has to the presence of soul; the second is the ability of the soul to grow through that partnership, for you benefit through your awareness of Spirit, and your soul benefits by that same awareness.
You are given your lives to grow, but this growth is in great measure governed by your willingness to look inward, to listen within, your willingness to be open to what is appropriate. Your lives are shaped ultimately by your openness. If you are closed to your neighbor, you will be closed to the light within. Being open and living with that openness requires an openness, both within and to what lies beyond. Your lives essentially are a journey that takes you along the pathway leading to loving to Love. This you know, but this is the entire purpose, that all-encompassing reason you experience human life. When you acknowledge that your purpose is to become loving, all that you do will be reflective of that purpose, and as you do so your soul grows, matures, develops, deepens, broadens every significant way imaginable.
Why are you asked to grow? If God is perfect, what is the need for such growth to take place? What is the purpose of your having souls if all is already fully whole? God gives you life, not so that God can grow, but so that love can expand. It is true, God could have created a reality in which there was no room for growth, there was no room for development, there was no room for an expansion of love, but it is part of God’s plan that love must expand. Your lives can be described as participation in expansion.
Love is indeed energy. The nature of energy is to expand in balance, but nevertheless to increase in one form or another. When a stone is dropped into a still pond, the waves reach out. When light travels, it expands. When heat is created, it expands outward—it does not contract. When ice freezes, it expands outward—it does not contract. The direction, therefore, of everything that is is one of expansion.
Your relationships with others in the end are not self-directed. They are directed toward another. When you give a gift, you give because it benefits something beyond yourself. It is true, you may benefit, but ultimately the benefit reaches beyond. The characteristic of love to expand is no different.
Love must increase, for love is based on the presumption of expansion, of reaching outward. It is not based on the necessity of collapsing within. It is therefore logical, understandable, that you consider the natural direction of love to be one of expansion. You are asked to reach out to others, to be compassionate and loving, to be good listeners, because moving outward beyond the center is the natural direction of life.
It is God’s purpose that all that is created expands. When souls are united ultimately with the love of God, it is not the soul that becomes less; it is the love which becomes greater. Without the love of each individual soul, the total love that is God would never expand.
The religious celebrations that you enjoy at this time of year are built on the need for light in a time of darkness. Religious traditions depend upon light—candlelight, the light of love, the light of music—but light expands and replaces the darkness. Faith expands and replaces despair. These ceremonies that you participate in are therefore celebrations of light increasing and pushing back the dark. It is the growth of joy that overcomes the despair, that overcomes grief, that overcomes doubt, that overcomes fear, for what are doubt and fear and despair but energy which focuses on self, energy which wishes to collapse in upon itself. It is the nature of all religious sacred occasions that one’s awareness of the God Center expands.
And so it is that God ordains the growth of love, the growth of good. As you have observed, it is not God that expands, but rather what God has created that is good…that expands. You are therefore given insight through these teachings into the meaning of Spirit, the function of the soul, and the potential of interacting with all who surround you. You are asked to reach out and embrace what God has created, not sitting in judgment, not questioning value, but accepting the beauty of shared spiritual content, shared spiritual energy.
There are, of course, many who turn their backs on the potential for this growth, and that is okay. Their time, as you would define it, for growth is yet to come. All souls eventually grow to become the love that is God. This is an undeniable statement of truth. There is no merit placed on growth being achieved quicker than another, for in a sense of spiritual development, there is no time. There is only growth, there is only this expansion of which we speak.
You share in that natural tendency. You share in the growth of your soul. You share in the growth of all souls. You share in our growth. You share in the growth of God’s love. You are all a part of the rhythm of this growth. You are all a part of what God intends for all of creation. You are “in the flow,” so to speak, for that is where you ought to be, and it is your spirit center within that allows you to travel within the current, rather than be sidelined, waylaid, or lost. Your lives are given light because of this journey. Your lives are given meaning through your efforts.
You are indeed blessings in our life when you pause to contemplate why it is you are given this opportunity. It is for us a source of great joy when you pray for our development as well, for you and we share the same journey. Just as you pray for those who have gone before whom you know, it is enormously helpful to us if you pray for our growth, for our expansion. Prayer for us is an enormously freeing experience. When you pray for us, we are freer from our missed bonds of human experience. We are given strength to look ahead. When you ask for our blessings, you ask for our help, you are not slowing our progress. In fact, you are enhancing it, for we are given additional strength to serve you, and that strength provides growth and expansion for us. You should never hesitate to ask us, to ask any spirit for help, whatever that help may be for you. We, your guides, indeed all spirits, are strengthened when our help is openly sought. We are given light from the light you put forth in those prayers. Your light expands and encompasses our existence. The result is a luminance that is brilliant and warm and characterized as love.
You are blessed by that brilliant light, and we are blessed by your light. It is a great joy to share in this expanding environment of loving acknowledgment. You are love, you are becoming pure Love. We are love, and we are becoming pure Love. It is God’s will, and it is the journey that your soul and we share together, embraced as a unit of great brilliance. Open yourselves to that light. See us, see God, see the true light that belongs to one another.
Amen.