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Each of us in this generation yes our generation has inherited the power that was predicted in the New Testament. The power to destroy this world or if we become one with our Maker using His Divine Will we can evolve this world. I believe in the peaceful Second Coming as the solution to the world. We in oneness, do not have to see the world destroyed. We can begin by understanding that God is personal in the sense that He affects every individual differently. God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes but everyone who looks at it sees a different face. Religion should not begin with a series of theological propositions, but with community. We need to have a tolerance for other people's views concerning what they see in the mirror. How they look into and view their God. We must teach our children that praying should be a natural part of growing up. We can teach them to be grateful for all things that happen in there life. Grateful for health, for the water they drink, the sunshine that grows the food they eat. To be grateful when they have a good day. When they awake in the morning begin at that moment to thank God for a new day. A new opportunity to discover Him. We must abandon our ideas that if we are good and pious people, God will protect us and our families from tragedy and let it happen only to other people. When a loved one becomes ill, a child dies or we lose a job or we go through a divorce we become angry at God we feel we have kept our part of the bargain and God has cheated us and not kept His part of the bargain. We must teach our children and ourselves a new theology. That God is not responsible for everything but that some things in the world are beyond His power and using the words of William Sloan Coffin when his son died, God's heart was the first to break. Before I understood God, my first experience was in reading the Book of Job as How dare God do such a thing to one of His children. .As my soul opened into the truth of who God is and what He was to Job. I was able to read the Book of Job in a totally different light. My conclusion was that God does not send sickness or disease, accident or tragedy. All of these things happen for other reasons. Either from laws of nature or for reasons of human cruelty or foolishness. God sends the strength to survive and transcend the tragedy. This is what God did with Job. And Job (because he knew his God was able to receive all that he had lost and more.) God did not want my little grand baby to be born with asthma. God did not want my Grandmother to die. What God did do for me was to help me face her illness along with my daughter. God helped me & my mother face the death of my grandmother with courage. God gave my mother, myself and my daughter the insight to take this personal tragedy, this illness to reach out for others in their illness and their tragedies.. We learned to find God not in the tragedy, but in our spirits that held the strength & the power to surmount and survive the tragedy. In the course of my work (visiting hospitals, talking to the bereaved who have lost loved ones through cancer & lost children who have died at birth from an illness.) I have seen: Mothers who were just beginning motherhood taken from their children. Fathers who had just begun the prime of their lives taken out of life, away from their wives & their children. As a result, most have asked me "Why does God permit such injustices to happen?" Or others have asked me why after Ronald Reagan has done so much for our country why should he be allowed to get Alzheimer's disease? I say to them rather not, Why does God permit this, but Isn't it amazing that doctors and nurses could be so dedicated to trying to help people surmount illness? Isn't it a wonderful expression of love we see as Nancy his beloved wife tenderly holds his hand & helps him to go the rest of the way. The closer I walk with my dear beloved God. The more reverence I have of Him. Part of my reverence is the understanding that conversation with God involves listening much more than myself talking to Him. As I commune with Him I find no need for me to persuade Him to my way of thinking, but it is a matter of the two of us sharing our minds with each other. It is in this sharing and yes even in my grieving that I can see His way of seeing things rather than in the way I see things. I learn to see the world from God's point of view. When we begin our spiritual quest, our path is like climbing a mountain. We move upward for a time, then we descend into a depression. Then up-ward to fresh heights. It is this same experience we have in our relationship with God. We rise consciously toward Him for a time, then suddenly discover things coming up from the subconscious that pull us down. At times we may feel as though we are going backwards. But the truth is this is a part of the overall climb toward Him. As we learn to go with the dips that take us downward, we soon find we are being guided in everything. We find we have only to ask and suddenly we know the answer. The closer we become to God's presence in our lives, the more we find Him playing an active part in our lives. Things that we need are there when we need them. The right opportunities seem to materialize almost as if by magic. A personal relationship with God has made my life a better one. It has enabled me to accept my limitations without being frustrated by them. I know that no matter how many mistakes I make, no matter how many times I have let Him down or myself down. God always accepts me. This personal relationship with God has brought me into His Kingdom. I have been able to penetrate the veil to His world. In my taped series What Happens When We Die you will see as I have that you need not be afraid that death is the end to all. It is just the beginning. This personal relationship with God allows us to see Him in our children, our neighbors, it opens our eyes and we can see God in that persons hand when we are feeling lonely. We see God in the call on the phone when we just needed to hear that someone cared. We recognize that God is working through them. This I believe is what God wants us to see especially because He has never left us alone in our pain and in our tragedies. Those times we have felt abandoned by God and we said "Why did God let this happen to me?" When one knows God it is not a question of Why? It is a cry for pain. But deep in our spirits we are always assured that God cares for us. God does not want this to happen to us. God does not hate us. God loves us and in His love for us He is also grieving. Will each of you who read this message today pray in a special way? Know that we are a large family rather than a belief system. We must not love a religion. But we must love God's people. God is not a matter of us being in the right church. the right place. But of doing the right thing. God is in our lives when we help the poor, when we speak out for an injustice and when we stand for someone in a court of law knowing they are innocent. God is in our reaching out to touch a lonely person God is in the sun that shines on our faces in the summer. God is in the snow that falls ever so gently in the winter. If one has ever read these tender lines from Deuteronomy: "The eternal God is a dwelling place and underneath are the everlasting arms". What could be clearer? What do we wait for? St. Therese of Lisieux instructed us further: "Happiness is not what attracts me. It's Love! To love, to be loved, and to return to the earth to make love loved." Sister knew that only love heals. Only love could make one whole. Only love could take us beyond ourselves. But it was not the love of man or of self. It was the spontaneous open love of God. Sister found this love while she was praying, reading the scriptures, walking in the garden with her father, listening to her mother as she would read stories to her and her sisters. Sister Therese' found this love doing the laundry and it is this same love we, too, can experience. We can be reborn! Mother Teresa of Calcutta who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 said this "My message to the people of today is simple. We must love one another as God loves each one of us." To be able to love, we need a clean heart. Prayer is what gives us a clean heart. The fruit of prayer is a deepening of faith and the fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service, which is compassion in action. Religion has nothing to do with compassion, Sister Therese' says it is our love for God that is the main thing because we have all been created for the sole purpose to love and to be loved. Let us close with this message. For some people the word "God" is a limiting term. I was moved by His Holiness the Dalai Lama's remarks, who did not use the word "God" in his writings. He wrote about kindness, compassion and tolerance in our lives. And the truth is we need to remind ourselves of who and what we really are and what our purpose is. It is then we can extend our hand to all who come before us in unconditional love and forgiveness. With every unhealed relationship that becomes healed, the world becomes a better place for us to live. As we move towards each other in love and not in separation that oneness within us becomes more apparent. It is in giving that we receive and it is in love that we die to self and are born into our Creator for our everlasting life. The process of opening up to the God presence is a continuing one. I don't think of myself as having arrived at the final, ultimate truth. I feel that my experience is still limited and probably always will be, but will continue to grow and change. I do know for me as my transformation of self continues, my life and experiences of God will never be the same. No longer will God be experienced as something we were taught to believe in but rather as something we can truly experience each moment of our lives. Will you join myself and all the great teachers of the world in this message.
 Copyright © 2000 Patricia Mischell &
The Positive Living Center |
t is
only when we can see through God's eyes that this New Jerusalem, a time
beyond sorrow, beyond separation, and beyond death can be achieved.
