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"God loves each of us as if there were
only one of us." - St. Augustine
There is no greater love relationship that any of us will ever
have than our relationship with God. Love is at the core of our
recognition and awareness of God. "Perfect
love casts out fear," we can read in scripture, but
unless we know that "perfect love" is the Power and Presence
of God within us, we will continue to fear, to doubt and to worry.
Our security lies in our
ability to love God as it is impossible to trust someone or something
that we do not love. Our relationship with God, then, becomes our
relationship with each other. What we withhold from each other, we
withhold from God. In the Ultimate, our every relationship is with
God ... we may call them family, wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend
... whatever, but in Reality, It is God reflecting back to us our
relationship with Him. But, for many of us we never seriously
examine our relationships and therefore we never gain the awareness of
how truly important and necessary each person is in our experience.
There is a part of me in you ... and a part of you in me ... this is the
Truth. If I resist this part of you that perhaps challenges me or
my ideas and beliefs than I will never realize fully and completely
"What" I am. As we understand the revelation of St.
Augustine, "God loves each of us as if there
were only one of us," then we understand that everybody in
our experience is there "for us" and no one is against us.
In the Ultimate, this is love unifying with the individual, bringing
everyone and everything into our experience to support us and assist us
in becoming more aware of "What" we are.
Knowing "What" we
are is ultimately tremendously more important than "who" we
are. The "who" changes ... the "What" is
change-less. The way in which we arrive at the knowledge of the
"What" we are is through love. "Love
looks not with the eyes, but with the mind," wrote William
Shakespeare. And ultimately the most important person
in our experience is the one not affected by what they see with their
physical eyes ... but what their "mind sees" ... their
intelligent intuitive Self, the Indwelling Spirit of God.
It takes great faith to realize
that in every miserable experience we have ever faced ... God was
Present with us ... and for every moment we felt helpless and hopeless,
the Infinite waits in "silent repose" for our recognition of
It. In the Ultimate, "What" we are is a Perfect Idea in
the Mind of God ... and God is always seeing us as "Perfect"
... never separated from us ... but we, in our judgments of what is
right for us and what is wrong for us ... separate ourselves from God
and from our own Divine Nature. We are in Truth ... "Love
Expressing" at All times and in All ways ... for in Truth we are
the perfect image and likeness of the Divine in form. Our Divine
Nature is change-less ... no beginning and no end .. Eternal and
Ever-lasting.
Our
eyes separate us from our Good ... as we judge what we see ... what
appears to us ... but as we use our mind to see ... we will lessen our
judgments and we will see with Love. We will see our Self in all
those that God has brought into our experience. We will never
discount each other or diminish each other in any way ... we will see
our own "perfection" no longer as fragments but as a Whole as
we realize that it takes everyone in our experience for us to realize
our Whole-ness. In Reality, we will never be perfect humans ...
and this God does not expect of us ... our path is lighted by seeing
everyone else and the world we live in as perfect. Not one of us
is outside of the Omnipresence of God ... and not one of us is outside
of the ever-lasting love of God ... and no matter what you may say or
do, or no matter what I may do or say ... "Love wouldn't count me
out" ... and in the final analysis ... that is ALL that matters.
And
So It Is!
Maximum Love,
Rev.
Hank Bates
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