2006-06-01. Partnership With Our Father
Lightlines #82
Topic: Partnership with our Father
Group: Lightline TeaM
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Opening
Jerry: Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, well here we are again, your children. Its like we’re gathered about your knees, looking up with bright, eager faces, happy and expectant to hear this next chapter in, you might say, the greatest ongoing story ever told. We just feel so lucky that we’re alive now when you and your celestial family decided to start the Teaching Mission, to talk to us directly this way. We feel so blessed, considering all the generations of folks that didn’t have this opportunity. But still, they had you there with them all along, right with our Father inside us, part of our minds, part of our hearts, part of our feelings. So welcome, and we pray and ask you to help us be aware of your presence. Help us open our hearts and our minds to feel you and to experience you, to make you a part of our lives. Amen.
Michael: My dear children, this is your father, Michael. What a joy this is. I feel your wonder, and its thrilling to me, my children. How it moves my heart, and how I can feel it moves your heart, too, for us to touch each other. This is a wonderful thing in that root sense of wonder, of opening ourselves to we know not what each moment. But with the courage that Mother helps us maintain, with the trust in our Father, who creates the way for us one step at a time, we step off and we boldly go into the future trusting that He will be with us, trusting that He gives us moment to moment that which we need.
Lesson
This is the walk of faith. This is stepping off into the unknown, moment by moment. Then appreciating it, appreciating our Father’s creativity, that can not only create a whole universe, but create it in such a way that it is not repeating itself. Each moment of time is unique. Each moment of our lives is unique. There is no need to go back or to repeat ourselves. And so we look forward to the blessing that this newness brings us. It sustains us and it renews us.
Then the question becomes how can we perceive it? It can be an article of faith, and that faith can point us in the right direction towards being open, towards joyously giving up habits in exchange for this sense of newness. But how do we actually perceive it? How do we experience it? How can we let experience itself constantly fulfill our faith?
This is a task before us. This is doing our part in partnership with God to realize and experience his creativity. And we do this by realizing we are truly his children, and we were created ourselves to be creative. This is part of being a personal being, a unique being. We have our part to play, and it is like no other. This is our partnership with our Father. This is carrying our half of the load, if you will. This taking the responsibility that is intrinsically ours, and part of our power. This is what we can do. This is the joy of accomplishment like no other. We create our own reality along with God, moment by moment. The responsibility is in that root sense of being able to respond.
As your beloved Urantia Book informs you, life is largely not only within us, but its between us and our environment and our surroundings. And so if we look about us, we open our eyes, we open our hearts, we open our minds to embrace what is there before us. This is how we are able to respond. True enough, only God himself is truly responsible for creation. Only He can respond completely, absolutely to all of his creation. And so as we strive to be like him, we keep this uppermost in our mind that all that we perceive, all that we experience, all that we know, all that we share is partly us. And so with courage and with faith we respond.
And this is especially true for those other personal beings out there, beyond numbering, this enormous multitude of personal beings. These are our brothers and our sisters. We acknowledge their right to exist. We acknowledge the uniqueness of each and every one of them beyond comprehension. But doesn’t bother us. That gives us great joy, that the creation is always beyond our comprehension. We can only comprehend, we can only hold a small piece at a time, and we will never exhaust it, ever. But we can respond to that which is right in front of us. We can strive to respond adequately to those hungry eyes that search us for help, that search us for our response, to acknowledge them and say, Yes, my brother. Yes, my sister. What joy it gives me to experience you, to know you, to touch you, to share these fleeting moments with you. Know deep inside you, you are the treasure of my soul. You are what makes life worth living. And this experience of you is what I will carry into eternity. This is my possession. This is my soul.
And so we learn to love. We learn to radiate as if we are a little sun our self. We beam this good will. We shine this thanks that they are there, that God has these children with whom we share our lives, for they too help make each moment new. They too renew us as we renew them. They fill eternity with distinct, precious moments. So as we approach perfection, as we strive to be like God himself, our life begins to open up, our days begin to open. And each moment, each day becomes more unique, more distinct.
This is how we do it. And I say we because Mother Spirit and I, in our own realm, experience you as our greatest joy. And in this we are most like your, for we too are evolving. We too are trying and learning. We too enjoy our own souls. All these experiences now, all these for us billions of years, that we watch our children come into existence, and all the nurseries of time and space, we watch them grow up through our local universe, and then we bid them a fond farewell as they head out into the galaxy, bound for Paradise. And then what joy when they return as final beings, fully achieved beings, radiant beyond a thousand suns. And still our children, still a part of our soul.
This is what you have in store for you. This is what you are earning, day to day. And this is the response-ability that you are learning. So fill your dreams with this ability to respond. Just let go, forget yourselves. Be fully there for another. This is how you grow your soul. This is how your renew yourselves and renew each other. This is the connection. This is beaming love toward everyone you meet. And as you do it, my goodness, look what emerges. That crowd of anonymous faces turns into this person, and that person, and this one. This is your treasure.
So Mother and I bid you welcome into our family. Feel our love for you, and don’t forget to feel the love of your brothers and sisters. They look to you, too, with hope, with happiness and joy.
Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, this is great fun for me, just being able to talk with you this way. So bring them on.
Dialogue
R: Thank you so much for you fatherly and brotherly words here tonight. And I envision a thanksgiving evening when we come back from over the river and through the galaxy to Nebadon from our long journey to perfection, and we come back blazing as little suns and sit down to talk over old time and enjoy family togetherness with you and Mother again.
Michael: Amen to that, my daughter. As you know, the finaliters have their own special paths to fulfill their days. And even they are growing, experiencing, expanding. None of us know exactly what the next whole phase of this universe will be, and that is part of the delight, is it not? To know that there is always good work to do, or indeed eternity would be some kind of hell boredom, would it not? So definitely I will look forward to that day from a human standpoint a long, long ways away, but have the assurance, know deep in your heart that God has that path laid out. Be in my peace.
R: May I ask a question?
Michael: Certainly.
R: Of the enormous multitude of beings out there, when the beings close to us, in our immediate neighborhood of interaction, seem to interpret our actions in a way that makes it difficult for us to love the response they are giving to us on our own actions. We choose to do things and those around us sometimes disapprove or reject our actions, the motives for our actions. It is hard to know whether sometimes our own choices aren’t indeed selfishly motivated. How do we check within ourselves that we are not being selfish, choosing to be bossy, and lay out plans of action that are unhelpful? And if we truly believe we are helpful, we are being helpful or we are trying to solve problems, how can we withstand the criticism and the disaffection? I feel bitter, and I don’t want to be that way.
Michael: Well, my daughter, just the fact you are being open to the possibility that you may not be perfect yet is a step in the right direction. A lot of our lessons, Mother and mine, recently have been on the difference between completeness and perfection. And it helps you to understand this difference and to know deep within you that moment to moment your are complete, and feeding this completeness in your stillness, feeding this love that Mother and I have for you, and sharing this love of ours with your own love to our Father, and loving God and appreciating, as I tried to spell out this evening, his creation, establishing a kind of spiritual home base, we’ve been calling it, within yourself. This relieves some of your need for a specific response from others. This is a feeling of completeness within yourself so that you don’t need others to feel complete, moment to moment.
You get a greater sense of who you are as your meditation deepens. Then from this point of security and strength, you can open yourself to, I like the concept you’ve evolved recently of feedback. Know yourself, know your own motivations, be rigorously honest with yourself as to why you are doing things, moment to moment, whether out of great mind and heart or even small mindedness from time to time. Just this tough, resilient honesty with yourself gives you a feeling of at least your own intention. Then here comes the feedback, here comes the response, that you have to be strong enough to entertain this, to listen to what folks are telling you, how they are perceiving what you are doing. And you compare it to your intention. You take each moment, when you have a feeling of the uniqueness of each moment, you lose the necessity to just gloss over or generalize. You can start to take moment by moment and treat each incident as this unique instance that it is. Here is how you get this, slowly grow this ability to respond to others.
And if they are halfway perceptive they can see this, they can see that you are responding to them. This opens the way for a genuine creativity the two of you can share, and allows each moment to be unique and new, so you’re not constantly, as you say, coming from the past or from past hurts, past judgments. This is how you can experience the newness that is there. So keep feeding your faith, my daughter, that this possibility is there, this possibility of a new, constantly revitalized you, and then how this can change those others out there who are part you. How you are perceiving them is partly yourself. Does this make sense to you? Do you understand the dynamic involved?
R: Yes, I do understand this, and I pray to understand it better. I simply sometimes think that I’m trying to expose my deepest intentions, and those intentions are rejected or misunderstood, or misinterpreted. So I will continue to seek your presence and blessing. Thank you so much.
Michael: My daughter, continue to grow your strength. It does come from within you, and this is where your deep stillness, it is like take a break, just totally relax as regularly as you can. And even from time to time through the day just totally relax, let it all go, take a deep breath, and start again. This is the only way you can break a cycle that you feel as bitterness. How do you stop this from continuing on? It helps to understand how this bitterness does project out, and how you will encounter it in what seems to be outside of you. And so it becomes a question of gathering your strength and starting anew. Be strong within yourself. And then you can better assess these separate moments as they come. They won’t all be just kind of put into a generalization of those folks out there. You have to perceive them as unique individuals in each moment as a new possibility.
R: Yes, and I will rely on your strength and company to push on, and when I feel that I’m, I think a stumbling block, or I don’t know if there’s a stumbling block, I think that I ascribe other’s intentions to be their own creative intentions which they are perfectly at liberty to hold. And I feel I’m trying to make allowances, and I feel I’m making over allowances, and I’m reminded often of your earthly family, and your brother Jude, who was a firebrand of a sort, and how inconvenient it was for the rest of your family. And I try to look at it in that light, and be patient, and be open to other opinions about my actions. And I will rely on your help and insight.
Michael: Well be in my peace, my daughter. I commend you on your self honesty. This is the way.
R: Thank you. I retire now.
S: Yes, Master, this is S in Salt Lake.
Michael: Good evening.
S: Good evening. Well I would like to do my part for the Correcting Time and bring industriousness and love and brightness to my fellow man. Just lately I’ve been sideswiped by disappointment in some of my friends and close relationships, but I’ve got a lot to be grateful for, and pressing forward. I wonder if you would have some words for me to affect and assist in those changes?
Michael: Well, its really wonderful when you can perceive out there, in your world, when that world starts to change, then you know that you are changing. When your world starts growing more interesting, more responsive, then you know that deep in your heart you are on the right path, you are doing the right thing, you are opening yourself to what is intrinsically there.
And usually it takes faith to lead the way. There is a part of Father’s plan that rewards courage, which means our things that are possible, but only happen when you just completely forget about yourself for a moment and step off. Mother and I talk about how impenetrable the future is, especially for you human beings on Urantia. You really don’t know sometimes what’s going to happen five or ten minutes away. This is the very nature of the adventure you are caught up in. Yet as you step off, as you exercise your faith, you can tell if you are growing. You can tell if you are becoming more loving, more open. You can see it in the way your world will change around you, the way people become more interesting, more responsive to you.
You probably notice as you walk down a busy city sidewalk, you tend to encounter yourself. Now think of those days when you are kind of dark and gloomy and kind of mad at the whole world, generally in that state of mind you are not aware of projections and how you are actually creating your own world. So you can wonder why everybody coming at you, just all these strangers are kind of gloomy and angry looking themselves. Yet you’ve had those times when for some other reason you are just kind of bubbling over, full of joy and happiness, and so that is what you encounter, as people totally unconsciously, they are not even aware they are doing this, but people will look to catch part of your spirit, part of your happiness. And so you can tell, this is what I meant this evening by you can experience and perceive when you are growing, when you are being more and more open, when you are appreciating the folks around you. Does this give you a few pointers?
S: Yes, that helps a lot, and keeping the eye of faith out the window to know that I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. What happens, though, when folks looks and say gee, there is somebody that I can touch the cloak of his garment, so to speak, and basically oh, there’s a happy guy that I can bilk and take for something? And I think everything is great and I get sideswiped a bit in my generosity. Am I being too generous, or should I still be generous and say oh well, there is somebody who has got to deal with their takingness or suckiness on their own. Because then I feel kind of numb after that, and go gee, I just want to trust my fellow man.
Michael: Well here, my son, is where I advised my own followers when I was with you to be “wise as serpents.” This is partly mental, partly spiritual, but there is a lot of psychology, just on a mental plane. You do have the hard decision to make from time to time of what is truly loving, what is truly supporting. You even have what you call a concept of tough love, in which you do not support, shall we say a parasitical kind of clinging onto yourself, where what you call over-generosity is not actually doing someone any good because you can rightly tell their intention is to take advantage of you. Or within their values, if they are looking at you in such a way they simply see you as an easy mark, or some kind of chump, because that is in their mind, that’s people either taking from others or getting taken from them. If that is their values, you have to deal with that. You have to trust your own perceptions that yes, you can be overly generous in this circumstance, and you are not doing them any good.
This is one of the toughest decisions you have to make, is recognizing this kind of situation. This is where you have to be tough and resilient to make that decision that they don’t care for. But here is, my son, sometimes you have to choose between someone’s affection and someone’s respect. And sadly they don’t always go together. Sometimes you have to reject an overture of affection which is merely trying to use you. Recognize it as such, and act in such a way as you have a possibility of gaining this person’s respect. Yes, you do encounter folks whose value system is either user or being used. They have nothing in their mind or in their spirit of a kind of equal, generous sharing between equals. Does this describe the situation?
S: Yes, that is a lot of food for thought. I guess what we are talking about is folks would be really close friends or new acquaintances that might be working, and just an unequal perspective of value, sort of a blindness to what they take, and easy availability to receive. Maybe I have a problem receiving.
Michael: Well, it is very gracious to accept and allow folks to give you things, whether it is a smile or a hug or some little article, some food, whatever. Because every now and then you run into genuinely generous folks, and it is big hearted then for you to accept what they have to offer and share it with them. But the difficulty comes when you sense you are being used, someone is rather cynically, or as you said sometimes just unconsciously being a bit parasitical. They are taking and they may not want to acknowledge how much they are taking from other folks. And here they need more than anything else this honest feedback from you, for you to look them in the eye and tell them how you perceive this situation. This is what they need more than anything else, is good honest feedback. They need to know how they are affecting other folks. Is there anything else you wish to discuss about this?
S: Well, that sure gives a lot of the pieces of the puzzle back in my perception. Thank you so much, Master. That’s just what I needed to here. So I’m grateful to be in service and to carry on.
Michael: Well, be in my peace, my son. Are there any other questions or comments?
J: I think I would make one comment. This is J, and I would like to know, I understand R has retired, and I think I heard the sound that means that she is no longer on the line, and somehow I would like to convey a group empathy.
R: Let me interrupt you, J. No, I’m still here. I just meant that I retired from that active conversation role.
J: So I want to express a group empathy for your situation, and I more than understand your vulnerability. And I think the answer was excellent. And I want to say that I was grateful to hear it myself. And I hope we can both remember who we are and be strong in that, so that when these situations arise we can just know who we are, and be confident in it, and let whatever needs to be said, be said, without it hurting so much. And I think that is the extent of my comment.
R: Yes, knowing that our brother and father Michael here has turned his attention to this and is aware of it anyway, all the time. Sometimes it is difficult in the heat of the moment to remember that this is not even necessarily a test. It’s just that is what is happening at this moment, and we just go on and let it be. And so it’s wonderful to hear that reassurance of going forward and listening to our heart choice and our intent and honing, cleansing our intentions, so that we have no fear of our own intentions.
J: Right. Carry on.
R: Indeed, all of us. Love is here.
J: Grateful for this message tonight.
Michael: My daughters, amen, amen to all the above. Yes it does my heart good too, to feel you understanding each other this way. My main message tonight was that you know your faith is working when the world around you changes and grows, becomes more interesting. And even though it may not be fathomable, you begin to appreciate how much of your human situation was deliberately created by our Father, and what a blessing, this adventure that can get rather fearful at times, a bit scary, but how necessary it is to keep you growing. For you have to trust that our Father too has the greatest wisdom of all in his kind of tough love, and what He has in store for you as a reward. This is not easy to keep in mind in the middle of pain, in the middle of real fear, and so you can just prepare yourself as best you can for those times that do come. And an appreciation of this helps you recognize when your fellows are themselves caught up in great fear or pain. Were there any other questions or comments?
J: I can’t thank you enough.
S: Yes, thank you, Master. I sure love you.
Closing
Michael: Well, my children, let me close this evening’s meeting then. Mother Spirit sends her love. Keep in mind how much she is right in, just a part of your mind all the time. This is probably one of the greatest joys you will experience on awakening on the Mansion Worlds. The whole culture there is such a, what you might say a universal acknowledgment, a recognition of how much Mother and I are a part of you. Just like our Father, his presence in your mind has always been with you. And though you may not get the pure message from your Father Adjuster in it’s pure state, though you can recognize still its always there, its part of your thinking, part of your direction. Just like my Spirit of Truth is helping you moment to moment sort through what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is not. This is how we enjoy being part of your lives.
And in your present state, and again I’ll say especially on Urantia, its especially delightful to Mother and I when you recognize this and just simply say, “Hello! Hi there, Michael, Mother.” Just whether you are driving down the freeway or walking through the park, whatever you are doing, changing the diapers on your baby. Just to know we are with you, and we treasure these moments when you realize this. It’s a little extra boost for us, a little glow, if you will, right within us. So feel Mother’s love surrounding you.
Take a break from your busy activities, and just feel it soaking right into your bones. And feel even deeper, ever so deep, down, down, way down inside of you, my peace. Like a little ball of energy, just sitting there glowing, letting you relax. Step out of time for a moment or two. Say hello. You’ll be back into the fray soon enough. Just let everything stop for a moment. Feel our Father right in your heartbeat. This is life itself. This is his power sustaining us all. Good evening.
