2006-05-01-Friendship, Service, & Vocation
Marin #89
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Friendship, Service, & Vocation
o 1.2 Group: Marin TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Michael
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialogue
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Friendship, Service, & Vocation
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Prayer. Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, We welcome with joyful hearts Your invitation to become very dear and close friends. And so we would like to see You both as our parents—very deserving of our respect for Your suggestions that come from Your enormously vast experience—and at the same time, greet You as our friends to share our day to day lives, and be close to us as only a friend can be. We ask for Your divine help that we can be Your friends, and give to You our loyalty not only as a son or daughter, but as someone who can give You a very dear and close company too. Amen.
Michael. Good evening, My children, this is Michael, your friend, and brother, and your father—all three rolled into one, if you will. As I stated last time, it was part of My mission here to be an example of how God, our Father is your friend, and how I as His Creator Son can be your friend too—basically out of Our own intrinsic nature, but also that you might have an example of how to be better friends with each other.
Lesson.
And so it is Our devout wish that those of you who are in a family relationship of parent and child can, in a way, transcend even this accident of birth and, over and above your family ties, grow into a very close friendship with each other alongside any differences in age, or sex, or experience. I think those of you who have achieved this friendship that transcends your relationship of being a parent, or son, or daughter, you know the wonderful reality I’m pointing at, and how friendship, representing the combined free will choices of both partners, is truly the greatest relationship between two personal beings.
Because real friendship worthy of the name depends upon this free will exchange. As has been said, greater love has no man for his fellow but he would give up his life for his dear friend, so think of the basis for that spiritual value of consideration. In all your choices in how you live and spend your time, consider its effect upon the others in your life. Solicit, then welcome your friends’ opinions and insights. What a wonderful extension of yourself this becomes. How much more rich and full your own life is when you are able to share yours with others, and invite them to share their live with you. How more broad and deep your experience is when your friendship enables you to transcend the common human differences of age, and experience—living in different, changing times, and differences between the sexes–how men and women look differently at the world. Consider how friendship can help you bridge the other great gaps of culture and social class.
Now think of the coming phases of your eternal life. Your Urantia book informs you that upon awakening on the first of the Mansion worlds you will immediately fraternize with all the other ascending mortals from over six hundred planets of your Local System. And so you will be encountering many slightly different human beings, each bearing the characteristic and unique history of his or her individual planet. Also you will immediately be able to perceive the lowest forms of angelic life, the Cherubim and Sanobim who volunteer to be your Morontia Companions, and help you feel at home in your new world. Then there is the provision made so that some of the higher forms of your Celestial Family can become visible to you on special events set up so you can visualize different forms of angelic and higher beings.
You can think of your life to come as an explosion—literally—of friendship with different human and extra-human kinds of personal beings. Because all these personal beings bear the stamp of God’s creativity. Every personal being is unique, one of a kind in all of creation. Though at first you may recognize only the class or type of being, very quickly you will be able to discern their individuality. You can understand, from their viewpoint all Urantia human beings look very similar, yet they have the ability to distinguish you as you individually are.
So this is another great reward of friendship—to transcend and get beyond categories and generalities of peoples in your own immediate world. The greater variety of friends you feel close to, the greater becomes your ability to see individuals among all the different people of your planet. This helps you get beyond stereotypes and prejudices you may have been raised with. Here your friends literally help you escape the accidents of your own birth—your family and culture, and realize ever deeper a greater spiritual unity that only emerges when you are able to let go a need for uniformity and conformity.
This is how friendship helps you mature and become open-minded, and open-hearted in your feelings. Friendship is such an enticing allure to be honest, to be who you are–as you say—right up front, right on the surface, you also find in this desire to be honest with another, the ability to be honest with yourself. This is a delightful, creative circle where your self-honesty feeds your honesty toward others, and your desire to be honest and consistent, to be genuine, out of love for another person, gives you a feed-back on yourself.
All of this is why when, near the end of your life here on Urantia, as your soul becomes more and more available to you, more and more part of your conscious, waking moments–the richness of a whole and fulfilling life, it will be obvious that your greatest treasures have been the friends you have known. It will be so much easier to see this is the greatest reward of life–right within life: what you have been able to share with another person you called your friend. It is what you are willing to give to a friend in need that will be the hallmark of your generosity, and your graciousness toward another. Those of you who have done this know what a thrill you get from being there for someone else. This is literally what has held the human race together all these hundreds of thousands of years. This is what men and women have most truly know, and truly valued, no matter how primitive or advanced/cultured a life they knew.
So use this understanding to illuminate how you choose to live your life. How do you choose to spend your time? The material things of life can be quite interesting and exciting, but We suggest you look for a good balance here between the time you spend on material acquisitions, and what friendships you are able to cultivate and grow irrespective of these possessions. Where and how are you spending your time? For some, a material possession seems to be so much more tangible than something so spiritual as friendship. They think, well, friends may come and go, but I’ve got this thing here for the rest of my life. But from Our viewpoint, this only indicates a self-alone person who is out of touch with their own soul, out of touch with the fact it is your friendships which are the most enduring, the most valuable, the most unique and irreplaceable.
This is why a person who knows true friendship does not hesitate to give up all else to sustain that which is most important. This is why men and women of real courage and deep soul conviction have given their lives for others, not as martyrs, but as devoted servants. Mother Spirit and I never ask you to die for others; We ask you to live for others. This adds to the glory of life itself, the glory you will know when you have been able to do so. Again, We are just pointing you at how to have life more abundantly, how to bring into your own life the life of others.
And yet, and yet, any such list I or Mother could spell out for you would always be incomplete for the very transcendent nature of friendship, and how each one is as unique as its partners. So let Me make a final suggestion: that this is the best way to assuage a strange, paradoxical feeling—the fear of freedom, an actual fear of doing the right thing that can overtake you at times. It’s a kind of anxiety that if you do give up your bad habits and self-defeating, self-limiting ways, my goodness!—how could you possibly fill the time? So may We suggest you look to friendship, and spending more time making good friends. Take it upon yourself to go out and meet them.
This is that good work with which you can fill your time. This is the real soulful reward that you can have forever. This is the promise of friendship. Reach out your hand and make it yours. Exercise your faith and give of yourselves so that you can find yourselves far, far beyond what you can imagine. This is Our invitation to you, My dear children. Mother is right within you, as you are within Her, and I am always beside you. Together let’s go out and make some more friends. What do you say? If you have any questions or comments this evening, I think exchanging them would be a friendly thing to do.
Dialogue.
Student. Yes Michael, it seems like one of the things that’s lacking in my life is true friendships. Other than my daughter and (Name), I know people, but I really don’t have friends to go do things with, or share with. I tend to be more a solitary person, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by my own choice. I have tried to reach out and be friends with this new group I’m in, in the city. We’ll see what happens with that. I feel like I’m losing a lot, that no one really knows who I am, because I am by myself so much. But I do know there’s this push within me to break out of that…in a sense, solitary confinement. I do want to embrace the world.
Michael. My son, I welcome your self-honesty, and hope My lesson this evening has given you something to reflect upon, and be open within yourself to feel for your heart’s true desire. Some folks are very happy by themselves, and some have had little choice in their way of life. But it is good to open yourself to these feelings if they are truly those of loneliness, or a desire to have a greater circle of friends with which to share your life–to have the courage to welcome this and feel that push to get out there and meet some more folks.
In one way you are blessed in your modern, highly-mobile society in being able to meet a lot of different folks. This was not possible for many hundreds of thousands of years of mankind’s living in relatively small tribes. But even that tribal life had its own compensations due to the very lack of privacy. With the modern ability to live more private lives, the emphasis shifted to your own deeper desire, so just think how you can utilize your greater mobility and access to different peoples.
Friendship is a tricky business, for in a way, it just happens. There is that mutual recognition between potential friends that seems to be somewhat beyond both of them—a third entity they have in common. Often you will find that simply by being friendly, after several years have passed you both have chosen to stay in contact; the friendship seems to have a life of its own. There is a balance between the effort you are consciously giving to it to maintain the contact, and the wonderful rewards you get from having known someone for a number of years, someone with whom you can share experiences over a period of time.
Like everything else, you always have to start here and now. Get out there and look around. If you would have friends, be friendly. This is where the openness We have been teaching is such a great value, of being able to see and then appreciate individuals. As you commented the last time, on your meeting this new group, you felt so good just being able to listen and accept them fully without any need to be self-defensive. You will find all these hallmarks of maturity stand you in good stead. So just open yourself to your own heart’s desires, and go where they point you.
Student. Which brings me up to another question, in a sense, about the work that I do. I feel like I’m reaching the point–and this is part of my isolation as well, because I’m by myself all the time, just because of the work I do–I’m reaching a point where I feel the need, and my soul feels the need, to do something else. It could be gradually—I don’t know. This is not fulfilling. I don’t want to work just to make money. That is the reality, of course, but I don’t know if my body can do this much longer. And I want to be a part of peoples’ lives, that You mentioned earlier. I want to affect people in a positive way. So I’m simply at a loss as to how to go about even opening up to a new way of living, of what is my purpose, my work? Because I don’t know. I feel this push within me to do something else, and I don’t know if it’s my ego, but I know I’m not being…I don’t feel fulfilled, and my body is not reacting as it used to, with all this hard work. I just want to be more involved in peoples’ lives, I guess, and to have people see who I am.
Michael. Then you are beginning to appreciate what it will take, for working alone as you have been can become a kind of habit, insofar as it is comfortably known. Being in a position to share your life with others can be a little uncomfortable at first, just because it is new, and strange. But in your talks before the lesson, I congratulate you on your growing sense of your own home base within you, of your self-discovery of who you are spiritually. As strange as this may seem, your sense of your own self-completeness gives you the ability to be a good friend. It is just a truism of human psychology that those who are too desperately in need of others, simply drive them away. Whereas the more you know who you are within yourself, the more you have, to give. Also, the more you are aware of how alone you are, irrespective of how lonely you may or may not feel, gives you an idea of what changes you have to welcome. So by all means continue to explore this group you are meeting.
As for finding another vocation in which you are not working so much alone, think in terms of whether or not you can extend what you are doing. If it is intrinsically rewarding for you–your gardening?—working with other people in this way?—perhaps you could try an administrative or sales level, rather than out in the field, so to speak.
Student. There is a strong part of me that wants to do something completely different. But I don’t know what. I don’t want to delude myself, but I want to do something where I’m more of value, where it’s more fulfilling. It’s finding that balance again. Maybe if I just let go part of the work with my smaller clients, and hold onto my larger ones who want to pay more, I could have the time to gradually get into something else. But I’m so loyal to my clients, and the relationships I have with them. But part of me wants to jump into that chasm of the unknown and see what’s out there for me—for my soul. I could be in tears right now because I want to do something more meaningful, more creative.
Michael. Yet the very nature of this points toward self-discovery. This is what you have to feel out yourself.
Student. But I feel so blind. This fear…as You said, there is this familiarity. I’ve been doing this for twenty-three years so I know what to do. There are rewards. I get to go outside and be in the sun, the fresh air; and the people I work for. There’s good money. But my body is telling me, it’s physically like I need to do something else. I want to live the life I was created to live. I’m tired of being limited by this familiar pattern. But I don’t want to do some… administrative thing either. There’s only so much I can do.
Michael. In that aspect, I was thinking more of the classical move from doing things yourself, to teaching them to others, and more or less directing activities. That is a different level in your same business,…
Student. Yes.
Michael. …and whether or nor that appeals to you. This is teaching the next generation, passing on what you have learned, and employing other hands and backs to do the physical work.
Student. Yeah… but that doesn’t invoke a lot of enthusiasm in me. I need to do something where I’m affecting people, like becoming a minister, to help them, and love them, and inspire them.
Michael. There are many organizations already devoted to volunteer work helping others, as an initial step, just to get your feet wet. There is certainly no lack for a need out there, for the good friend you could be.
Student. But what was I created for? What does God…I mean, what is my calling?
Michael. I’m afraid there is no answer to this outside yourself. It has to come from your own essence, you own heart. So We do not belittle the effort this takes, or the importance of this discovery. It does help to retrace the steps of how you got to here, and thoroughly understand and accept as part of the path all that has gone into making you who you are. If you wish to combine service with a vocation, this can be difficult, and it cannot always be done in a single step. You might have to explore different ways of service that you feel your heart longs for, along with your ability to make a living, for awhile. This will get you right down to the nitty-gritty—as you say, right down to the real service and what is involved in being in other peoples’ lives who do need you, who can use what you have to offer. Bring your desires down to earth. Try some volunteer work to see if this is really what you want to do—to be in peoples’ lives, and to help them.
Here it is wise not to assume you know what this will be before you get there, for this kind of service has its own rewards and promises, and its own difficulties and effort. But this is what it means to minister to others. You also have a great desire to be authentic, to be real, to keep growing. Student: Yes, I feel like my wings want to spread out, but they feel like they’re being tied or held down by my own limiting thoughts, by my own familiarity and patterns and things, by my own fear.
Michael. My son, understanding this is the essence of that good work, both on yourself and with others. We understand your desire to take wing, but We must remind you that most of the work is right down on the ground. One step at a time. Take some small steps to get your feet wet in service work. This group of folks you are meeting—see if you can find some friends there. Also, be aware of what friends you do have. Friendship is often very…strange. Sometimes a friend is someone you’re just happy to meet, without the faintest idea why. You’re just happy to be there with them. Sometimes the emotion is even more pure because it’s inexplicable. This is the element when the friendship seems to have its own life, and the happiness just spontaneously arises. So think of those folks you’re just spontaneously happy to be with. These are your friends.
Student (laughing). Yeah!—I’ll do that!
Michael. As I mentioned before, in a tribal society where no one moves around so much you have life-long acquaintances, at least, simply happening. Whereas in your modern, more mobile society, some folks are constantly moving away from friends they’ve acquired. That presents its own unique challenges.
Student. That’s what happened to me in my earlier days because we traveled around so much from country to country, and school to school, I was never able to have any permanent friends. So that’s stayed with me. Even though I’ve been in this county for a long time, they’ve all come and gone. I really envy people who have life-long friends. But I wouldn’t trade my earlier life—the travel, the cultures and the people I came in contact with—for anything in the world. Like You said, it made me who I am today.
Michael. You are evolving a spiritual family here. This is definitely a real basis for friendship, this spiritual kinship, this spiritual brotherhood—kindred souls, if you will, who share a wonderful curiosity about what’s out there. What is this spiritual realm opening before us? This wonder is wonderful to share, is it not?
Student. Yes.
Michael. Let Me encourage you to continue your research, My son, because you do have to wonder about what might be open to you, and then put a toe in the water to see what it feels like. Who are these people in this new activity? What is it really like? You have the imagination and the intelligence to plot out a future course, and your intimations of what a major thing it is, with all the anxiety that creates, gives you some measure of how wedded you are to your present way of life, and what’s required to take that next step you envision.
Student. It’s interesting; I was thinking of how much consternation I went through before (Name) moved out, all the different things I was feeling, yet it turned out well, for both of us. So in a sense all that consternation wasn’t really warranted. Part of it was just my own concern for her. So I know my potential is there, even though I have no idea what it looks like. I just know a change is necessary, in time, for me to continue growing and evolving. (heavy sigh).
Michael. I would not be so quick to judge that all this consternation—as you call it—is somehow unnecessary. It does represent a balance of forces pulling at you this way and that. You did have to go through it before to get to what appears to be a positive change. This is the value of what such decisions cost you. It is only by being willing to pay this price, this caring, that you stay in touch with yourself, and you keep open these friendships you have formed. So even though in this case you had a parting of the ways with (Name), you’re still maintaining an openness to all that occurred between the two of you. Your past—you soul is still available to you, which is not always the case. So often individuals act very harshly in trying to deny any of this evaluation, this weighing of alternatives—what you might call leaping before you look. They have an unwillingness to evaluate, to feel for the spiritual meaning of what they’re doing.
Student. I love (Name) too much to cut off any ties…(laughing)
Michael. Well, this is keeping a friend, is it not?
Student. Yes, I guess so.
Michael. Then that’s how you do it. So often, so tragically, this proves impossible for folks. The closer, the more intimate they were, this seems to drive them father apart later. I think you are learning what it takes to be a good friend.
Student. Yes…yes—especially with females. (heavy sigh again) I guess, deep down, I just want connection, and to love. Without that, I’m nothing.
Michael. I do believe you’ve taken My lesson to heart. That’s what it’s all about: realizing all the really good things friendship means. I think if you look deep in your soul, you will see you have known quite a few people in your life so far. It’s a wonderful stillness practice just to visualize them again, just say hello again to all those unique persons who came, and went, and to realize that they are still there in a way. You have shared your life enormously with other folks.
Student. Speaking of friends on the Celestial level, do I have a teacher I can communicate with? I’ve never asked this before, but I know C and J and R and others do that. I feel like I’d like to share, and have a teacher share with me.
Michael. Believe it or not, there’s a whole line waiting to volunteer. (laughter) You can have a spiritual Friend with whom you can communicate. Not only can They offer you valuable insights to help you see yourself as others see you, you have your whole life to give to Them. Opening your mind, your memories, then on a deeper level, opening your soul, your life experiences to Them, is such a great gift for a spiritual Being who has never known a physical life such as you have now. They understand you in general, but what a blessing you have to give Them of a particular human life, a unique life with all the folks you have known. So yes, this is very possible. It’s a kind of transmitting such as is going on right now, where you simply set yourself aside in a kind of meditation and let another extra-human Being communicate through you, usually by writing—some people type. Some folks call this journalizing, or keeping a journal. What a marvelous thing when suddenly your hand starts writing with Someone Else.
Student. I’d like that.
Michael. Well, you can talk with J after the lesson tonight and get some instructions. It’s an amazing kind of friendship when you open yourself to another kind of Being, usually a Seraphim, but sometimes an Ascendant Mortal from a far more advanced planet who really thrills to understand what life is like here on Urantia, because it is so unique in its particular history. But These are all volunteers who wish to come and help you and help others with what insights They can offer from Their own unique viewpoints.
Student. Yeah—I feel like I need some insights, some way I can initiate the changes I wish to create.
Michael. I do think this has been a good session. You’re bringing yourself a little closer, more nose-to-nose with the real thing, just by realizing how big it all is, and what it takes.
Student. I guess the bottom line is: this is my life. I want to make the most of it—to evolve, to grow, to love! To connect.
Michael. This is part of the difficulty accepting into your life the spiritual dimension with its intrinsic morality, with its hunger for perfection, with this need to evaluate what you are doing, and the courage and self-honesty to see habits and simple re-actions for what they are. Then to welcome a future full of new relationships, good service, right down-to-earth good acts; this is the stuff to fill your soul. This is the best training for what is to come. This is embracing the future and deciding to start it now. But one small step at a time. Feel your way along. If you are curious about something, extend yourself into that for awhile. See what it’s really like beyond your present imagining of it. Keep in touch with the friends you have. Be that good friend they can come to in their moments of need. It’s much to think about, but what better use of your time?
Student. Thank You.
Closing.
Michael. You’re so welcome. I celebrate your willingness to look at all these things. You are accepting a hunger for perfection into your consciousness. Keep your faith strong. Trust where it is leading you. Stay open to all that has ever been. Continue to be in My peace. Good evening.
