2006<\/a>. He was such a tender soul. It did something to my heart to see him in a bed at the VA, his bedding in disarray, his hair wild, and to have him cry on seeing me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAt the same time, my pregnant daughter had moved home. Two weeks after my dad died, in early 2007, she delivered my first grandson, Henry, and there was great poignancy in that time too, although it helped that I could hold him and walk with him and cry over him as much as I needed to.<\/span><\/p>\nWe had closed the coffee shop (in more debt than when we started) and were just getting by when the recession hit. Donny, in his HVAC work, had fewer and fewer jobs. We almost filed for bankruptcy – twice. Many of my friends were in trouble as much as we were. My \u201cACOL reading friends\u201d were wondering, as was I, where the abundance was. It\u2019s hard not to do that, when you\u2019re hurting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI speak here of some of this and the \u201cawful job\u201d I\u2019ve taken out of necessity. I was writing with no expectation that Jesus would answer. Maybe he came again because I started with, \u201cI need help.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nHis answer? <\/span>Paint a New Picture<\/span><\/i>. I have shared a more polished version of this message a few times, but I felt called to release it, here, as it came . . . within our dialogue. It\u2019s a message that might comfort those going through their own hard times. I know when I was going through mine, I would have appreciated it if I\u2019d come across something like this elsewhere. There\u2019s solidarity in sharing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSince I\u2019ve left this in its long form, if you\u2019d like to simply read the part of the message I\u2019ve previously shared, scroll down to <\/span>Paint a New Picture<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
July 4, 2009<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Independence Day and I\u2019m starting a new journal, a new day, a new life. I\u2019m here to admit I need help and that Terry needs help, and Ross, and that yet we don\u2019t, and that this has been confusing, a confusion only answered by friendship. It\u2019s helped me see there is no cause to exclude you, brother Jesus, from friendship. This weekend has been so revelatory. First Christie reminds me of union and relationship. Then Terry writes with an attitude so like mine \u2013 \u201cThere\u2019s no god outside of me \u2013 I\u2019m empty \u2013 where can I go? It used to be, I had someone to pray to.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nA necessary time. Don\u2019t bemoan it. Have you come back to me in friendship?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI have.<\/span><\/p>\nThen tell me what you\u2019ve gained. Tell me who you are and who you now know me to be.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI am new and I have returned to you new. I am also old and have returned to you old. I mean, I think, that I have two dimensions \u2013 my story \u2013 as you have yours, and a new story, as you have yours. I return to you in friendship, \u201cturn\u201d to you in friendship, as I do my other friends. I need to hear Terry say, \u201cI\u2019m intelligent \u2013 not rocket science intelligent \u2013 but intelligent enough, capable enough to support my family.\u201d When I hear Terry say that, I know how I talk about myself, I recognize the feeling behind it.<\/span><\/p>\nWhether he wants me to tell him or not, I can\u2019t help but tell him the truth of what I see: his kindness, intelligence, creativity, and that helps me see my own truth. I know he knows he\u2019s more than what he\u2019s feeling just now. And I know, from my recent experience, that I need to know my truth and carry it more lightly and more firmly, with humility \u2013 but not without confidence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI have a sense of needing to leave off the old story, the shame and the \u201cless than\u201d feelings of the past, while at the same time retaining the feelings that make me cry and cry out for justice. I know I have grown weary and impatient for my new story to begin. I know that if I\u2019m going to keep fumbling I want to fumble with you, not without you, not \u201con my own\u201d but yet \u201con my own\u201d in that way I am with other friends, with that recognition that they can help only so much. They can be with me, but they can\u2019t live my life.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd so, there is this place where the way I see myself and you intersect:<\/span><\/p>\nI see you as being able to help me \u201cmore\u201d than my other friends do, but with a new sense of response being up to me, my life being something you can only accompany me through, not give me the map for. I trust you, and so, when you \u201ckicked me out of the nest,\u201d as I call it, I felt good and as if you did have trust in me, and I needed that. But I forgot it a lot too. I felt a little as if you were standing back watching, more like a parent waiting for their child to grow up, doing the necessary standing back, and so I moved away from the feel of your friendship. . .a bit.<\/span><\/p>\nI did feel \u201con my own\u201d and was aware of the need for that feeling \u2013 if only to break any sort of dependency and to mature, which I admit to not feeling that I have accomplished, but that I hope has begun. I have both gained strength and been weakened by my own attitude, my way of viewing being \u201con my own.\u201d I have rebelled against my responsibilities and obligations, complained, let them overwhelm me, not known how to reconcile my resistance to things of \u201cthis world\u201d with my need to live within it.\u00a0 It has felt like a battle and I\u2019ve grown so weary.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut this shift to seeing you as friend, to seeing (remembering) union and relationship as well as oneness \u2013 the oneness of myself and this life I have to live and the oneness of unity with God, the weight of my shoulders and the heaviness of my heart, these burdens that I\u2019ve made of blessings, I know can lift with your friendship, just as Mary Love lightens my heart and my burdens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThese friendships help me cut the cords of all that keep me from thriving \u2013 as I\u2019ve done many times \u2013 but without conviction so that I remain tied. And so, I feel as if I know your friendship to be one of greater power \u2013. My friends have \u201ctheir own lives\u201d and their own problems, issues, cords to cut, and while all those things help me see mine, perhaps more than you could, the grace to keep them cut seems the power that you have and can only share with me when I am ready.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPerhaps in friendship, you follow your heart and that\u2019s all you can do, and maybe that is how you are, if I am to describe you to yourself, that you stand back just enough, even though it pains you, to let the fumbling and confusion go on, without the attempts to right it, for you know the gains that come of sitting in the fog of overwhelm, and the feel of having a destiny that you have to live out, knowing that in each small step you are accompanied but that it is up to you.<\/span><\/p>\nBut the feel of friendship and its equality and mutuality changes everything, changes the old God model of earning, if not so thoroughly that you don\u2019t ask, as we do with friends. Do you trust me? Do you love me? Do you believe in me? Do you have faith in me? Those are questions of friendship. I feel those alive questions between us and although I find it a miserable feeling to think your faith in me ever falters, when I see our relationship in the light of friendship, I would guess that it does and that you\u2019ve wondered about me from time to time. I imagine that it pains you when I do the same, not ever overtly not trusting you, not believing in you, not having faith in you, but when I pretend that those questions aren\u2019t there and it\u2019s a done deal.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
It\u2019s so easy to see with friendship \u2013 how you might want your friend with money to help you when you\u2019re down \u2013 but how they can\u2019t possibly give you enough to sustain you, and they have to do whatever they do gently, with true generosity that has no strings attached, and without pity so that it doesn\u2019t hurt your dignity, and so that you don\u2019t jump over onto one another\u2019s story-line and fix or problem solve the very matters that might make growth happen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m not saying it right, but I do feel that you have a respect for my destiny, a stake in me being who I am as fully as I can, the way I feel that Terry, in being the artist he was born to be will grace the world in a way that can\u2019t be done without. Yet I see that his struggles for and against, grace the world too and make his dear heart so dear, so that none of it is wasted, no suffering in vain. While you don\u2019t want your friend to suffer and it\u2019s painful to you, as painful as it is almost to feel your own (because it is your own in some way), it\u2019s a reflection that lets you see your own pain with the same empathy. That is absolutely essential\u2026 the feelings.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
I\u2019m less certain of the hopelessness, the way I feel at that awful job, the stuckness and imprisonment that feels so unnecessary, the need for some relief so vast. . . . The \u201cI\u2019m not meant to be here,\u201d feelings that you know are true while, at the same time, you have the feeling that you must be meant to be there because it\u2019s where you are.<\/span><\/p>\nI feel your help is a little like the help it is to write. With writing and art, we do it partially so that we\u2019re living it and not thinking about it. And so, for those hours, we\u2019re oriented the right way. Behind our conscious minds there\u2019s a truth being lived out and our bodies and souls feel it and feel more natural and keep moving toward that natural place so we can carry it everywhere. I think you can push and pull us toward out destiny, to that orientation toward the sun that feeds us, but you can\u2019t lasso us and drag us along, and you\u2019re like the friend who can see you\u2019re making things unnecessarily hard on yourself and who can see your gifts, but you\u2019ve got none of the fear of risk taking or the adoration of security so that your pushes and pulls are scarier to follow.<\/span><\/p>\nBut mostly the feeling of wanting to be taken care of by you is the greatest split in the friendship feeling because you\u2019ve said those words of being like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and you just don\u2019t want to have to worry about your health or your partner\u2019s health, or your kids, or to be dependent on other friends just to live, or to take horrid jobs to pay the bills, because this is not like the birds or the lilies. The more you live that way the more you feel like there\u2019s a promise that\u2019s been made that\u2019s not being kept, and like there\u2019s a betrayal of friendship going on, in a way, because people do, you know, friends do, hold you to what you say, like all those things in the course about not suffering and ease coming. You\u2019ve got a lot of friends standing around wondering \u2026 when? And <\/span>what am I doing wrong?<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYou can\u2019t help but feel you must be doing something wrong when \u201cthe way it\u2019s meant to be\u201d isn\u2019t the way it is and you\u2019re wounded and bleeding, or stuck and imprisoned to the point where you\u2019re suffocating \u2013 gasping for the air of freedom. You don\u2019t think your friend ought to let you get that far down that path if it can be helped, like you shouldn\u2019t have to beg before you get any relief, any one small thing coming along to lift you up a little.<\/span><\/p>\nI just read somewhere that passion means suffering and it\u2019s one of those things I knew but had forgotten \u2013 thus \u201cyour\u201d passion\/your suffering, may be a clue as to why passion gets called suffering so much, and madness and all of that.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
With my friends, it\u2019s like we\u2019ve been traveling through the mud and have reached the dry spot where you think it\u2019s going to be easier but you\u2019re dry yourself, you\u2019ve got that running on empty feeling, and the sun\u2019s a little too hot.<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m not quite in that place Terry is, although I\u2019ve been there often enough. I don\u2019t feel at the end of my rope right now because I\u2019ve gotten a little time and space and that time and space has returned me to you, and you might as well be all the hope in the universe, as I suspect you are, but not alone like each of us, wandering these perilous times, even if one at the beach and one in the jungle and one in freakin\u2019 Minneapolis buried under bricks that seem to block the sky.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAlone it\u2019s all a bunch of hassle and joined it seems less so and even as if the remainder of the journey can be that place where there\u2019s a coming together despite distance and form, that would make it all at least bearable and maybe even a thing of some joy, which right now seems a bit much to look forward to, but hey, you\u2019re the guy we\u2019re hoping in to show us the way, at least the way to pull it up from inside ourselves, or to return us to that center.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t quite the spirit that I started this with but I must add that I always felt my mission with the Course was more than the books and this is one place where, having started me on this path, I feel as if I can call you to at least collaborate on whatever is left to do. It\u2019s not my project alone, and I guess, now that I think of it, that is in the spirit of friendship in which I started out because, darn it, we did start this together, and I guess that\u2019s the one thing I really want to talk to you about because it seems as if the answers for all of us might be in there somewhere, in where you see this going and in you telling me if I\u2019m off in my vision of it, or my delivery, or at least discussing it with me.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
And what is your vision?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
That it\u2019s personal and collaborative and a melding of divine and human. That there\u2019s a way in which \u201cin the world but not of it\u201d is working against us and we have to bring the inner and outer together, join the world, join each other. That we\u2019ve got to have a love relationship (us and you), and us and each other, and us on this journey and whatever work we take up because of it, and that it has to be creative work, not head work, not of the intellect alone anyway, and not a way that uses the old skills and the old words that have us trying to manage our way as if we are in control.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe need to be powerful in our actions and words and this thing about making choices, which is a really tough one for me just now. I\u2019ve really wanted to tell people to accept this messy part of it all as the collapse of the old and to join with those very people who are in the mess so that they know that the mess is the happening and the birthplace of the new. Probably the biggest thing is the thing I haven\u2019t quite gotten down about being fully who I am and the knowing that in that \u2013 in each of us being who we are \u2013 is where we\u2019ll finally thrive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI especially haven\u2019t gotten down the language about that being the only thriving and the acceptance of this mess where it all seems like a gigantic struggle to simply live \u2013 that \u201cold world\u201d being the one we\u2019re forced to live in, in order to pay the bills. So, there\u2019s this sense of it not being \u201cthe old world\u201d we\u2019re meant to join with, but the new one that will rise from the mud. Still, it\u2019s awfully hard to accept the mud when you don\u2019t know for sure or feel as if you\u2019re with others in a place you can name truly necessary or essential or feel the movement.<\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s a little feeling of being pushed to quit those things you\u2019re tolerating and to forge something new, but the means is escaping us. I guess I, at least, feel as if there\u2019s this tiny band of us, one here, one there, and we\u2019re floundering something fierce, and I get this sense that we need more than the wee bit of encouragement we can give each other. We need you, the true ringleader of this movement, to make yourself a little more visible and to quit pushing us from behind, as it has felt, and to start walking with us, or something like that.<\/span><\/p>\nIt wouldn\u2019t be so hard if we felt the light of your blessing, even just in lifting the heaviness from our hearts, or in a few small breaks.<\/span><\/p>\nI appreciate things like the dream I had the other night so much, as if the gifts that waft up from my unconscious are your way of telling me I\u2019ve got the right the idea, and this latest dream was of cutting ties to the past. I\u2019ve had so many of those sorts of feelings, as if old patterns have needed to be broken and they\u2019ve been shattering in all sorts of painful ways for which I\u2019m nonetheless grateful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThere was the other dream too, of a warehouse, and the feeling that it\u2019s time for distribution of all the goods stored up, like it\u2019s a famine out there and I\/we are sitting on this desperately needed food and water (or this Course) for people\u2019s souls. How do we get this flow going, my dear, dear friend, with so much more knowing than me? The flow that furthers the collapse or starts the modeling of the clay, or at least ends in the bursting of the old wine skins?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
My dearest friend and collaborator, feel your heart, and the heaviness of your chest, all the strain running through your body, head to foot. I know your weariness and that of your friends, the weariness of this search for the new that feels so much like hanging on and letting go at the same time.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nYou desire more than anything to be in that place that will not require you to compromise yourself after a lifetime of compromising, but alas, you haven\u2019t yet landed there, and you are upset about this\u2026about the compromises you feel forced into making because you don\u2019t get a break in this time you label one of collapse.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nYou are picturing this time of collapse against the picture you have painted and so it is important to get the picture a little more clear. We might call it the end of the compromise picture.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI hope you\u2019ll feel the lessening when I tell you that you have known where the compromises lie and that this is truly marvelous, a thing that few now can see as well as you do. You have stepped back from many places that came to feel as if they went against your truth or your integrity, even when you suspected they might have brought you gain. You did not do this without being tempted, and you didn\u2019t always do it with the grace you would have liked, but you were brave in these actions and trusting in what you know\u2026if belatedly.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nThis is much of what you\u2019ve been feeling these past weeks, a great desire to trust beforehand rather than after some near misses. You have seen some of these as tests, and others as blessings in disguise that you hope will shore up your resolve for looking more straight on at the next temptation. You so desire a certainty you do not feel, a precognition or intuition that will warn you in advance or prepare you to be stalwart in your responses. These are the kinds of qualities I cannot give you and that you see yourself perhaps obtaining through greater self-awareness, which is fine, but not necessarily by or through the route that you are considering.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIt\u00a0 might come under a heading of not sweating the small stuff. The old could largely be seen as the small stuff \u2013 fixing this part and then this part and looking at this and then that \u2013 and thinking pretty soon you\u2019ll come to wholeness. It doesn\u2019t work even though it can help to bring a narrow version of health and contentment.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI say this happened most with the course, this stepping away, this dawning of awareness of compromises you couldn\u2019t make, because it\u2019s true and it shows that you have put the course, this work of ours, this heart and soul work, ahead of your own self. You do not as easily see the compromises you make with your life \u2013 those that come in what you see as smaller ways, like the meeting of physical needs. You\u2019re working out of love for your family and you\u2019ve come closer to leaving it than ever before, not for fear of work but once again for being unable and unwilling to compromise \u201cour work,\u201d even while it has remained so scattered and confusing that seeing it as a vocation or with vision has been difficult.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nThese are courageous acts, even in their contemplation, in your willingness to entertain notions of what you must do and what you must not do. These are not the old moral questions but the questions that arise of vocation and vision, but even those words are minimizing when it comes to what we are about and this new time, this history yet to be written, and this seeing that is of wholeness rather than parts, and that is of unilateral acceptance of yourself rather than acceptance of what you might label good.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI\u2019m not saying it will always be this way and that you won\u2019t, when the time is right,\u00a0 move in many ways toward a goodness that has about it many qualities of the former definition of goodness, but there is a need, as we enter the new time, for a release from the tyranny of what has been considered good and what has been considered not good or bad. And so these aspects of where you and your friends stand, are part of the collapse of the old tyrannical forms of goodness, just as there was a need for a collapse of those ways that required the sacrifice of animals, as if that symbolic shedding of blood \u2013 blood not one\u2019s own, could be redeeming in itself. The symbolic was never meant to replace the deep feelings of what was symbolized, or to lead to judgments and enforcements that merely made for more right-doers and more wrong-doers.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nSo, there is, indeed, a need for the good to not look so darn good, so a thing of rules and sacrifice, whether these are rules of health or of religion. There is so much harm being done with these rules \u2013 so much more harm than ultimate good. Societal observance of its members lends credence to its rules, rules for \u201cthe good\u201d of those who do not know how to choose the good on their own for their own self.\u00a0 Rules of force are not ever means for the good to thrive. They do not lead to changes of heart but to a destruction of the soul. External control is not the good it is made out to be and, as you have intuited, a great realignment of what is good is in the works.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nNothing truly changes without this realignment of former notions held firm, whether they be of what constitutes goodness or peace, success or enlightenment. The picture of what is aspired to, and the aspiring itself must change radically, as was needed in my time on earth. What good is there in seeking what is of no value to you? The clustering of goodness into a notion of what is \u201cgood for all\u201d is another aspect of the change that must happen. The world, at this time, in this information age, is made up almost entirely of such clusters, enough to keep this generation and many more to come, endlessly preoccupied with things of little value.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nAnd so, you and your little band of friends, who are not so few as you imagine, and among which I am one, are, you might say, early painters of the new picture. How can you paint this new picture from a place of health\/wealth\/success that looks like the picture that has been being painted for generations?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nYou may ask, How can we paint at all when we are not only broke but despondent?\u00a0 This is a good question, even while you look upon each other as new versions of new life, albeit in beginning stages that you presume will grow to look much finer sometime soon. What if this doesn\u2019t happen?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nYour next question might be how any attention to the new can be given while you\u2019re consumed by meeting the bare minimum needs of your physical life? How can you have an impact on more than a few? What means are you to use? What picture are you painting? How do survival issues not become issues of survival of the fittest? Of the ones most willing to compromise? You might ask if I am meaning that you become content and even happy with your low station in life. If I am saying that no help is coming. You must remain indigent, reliant on others, and still somehow stand above the fray. Impossible you will cry! Impossible to exist this way without the very compromise with which I began this conversation.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Paint the New Picture<\/span><\/p>\nAnd I will tell you \u2013 Paint the new picture. Paint the picture without worry about those on whom you rely, for those on whom you rely are not those you think they are. Paint the picture and you will experience the freedom of it, a freedom without compromise. Paint the picture, and the old picture will begin to fade, the one that has you in compromised positions that are nonetheless not the compromises of fitting in to the old picture but only of experiencing a minimal participation in it while the new picture is taking form.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nOh, Jesus, I get you, and I don\u2019t.\u00a0 Is this really the way it must be? Another idea, a direction that is direction only, another thing that can only be \u201cgotten\u201d at some level that none of us know much about?<\/span><\/p>\nYou each know far more than you think you do. Quit thinking.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nThis does not feel as if it takes any burden from us, even if it\u2019s a blessing. My body feels heavy with another idea of significance that is so unclear. I am happy that you have given me no feeling of being way off track. I really am. But I want more. Is there no more you can give, and I don\u2019t mean in the old way (much), only in the way of lightening the load so that we can begin.<\/span><\/p>\nYou see, you do mean to ask for help in the old way, the way that has miracles of load-lightening events coming to you from the heavens. The old rescuer ideas.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nInstead invite me into your work, into the painting of this new picture, into deeper friendship and collaboration so that old lines aren\u2019t redrawn. You have said so many times that you don\u2019t know what the new way is, only what it isn\u2019t. This is enough to guide you, but it is as tough a vision as any that says \u201cHere\u2019s the way. Do it like this.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nBeware of wanting the old ways, that\u2019s all I\u2019m saying. If you want the freedom of the new, if you want liberation for yourself and the generation coming behind you, if you want release from tyranny and to be no one\u2019s child, or slave to any task master, then you are going to have to do things in a new way. You\u2019re going to have to come to see yourself as creators.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nThis is the beginning. Paint the new picture. Embrace the partnership. Follow your gut. Paint the picture of such freedom that no compromise is possible.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nEnvision this now as a kind of anarchy. Compromise is only possible between fixed but differing positions. These fixed positions are, like the information that so distracts you, a clustering of assumptions. They don\u2019t actually exist. They are only experienced. These ideas, like those of goodness, that drive you all, are not existent in and of themselves. Someone gives them form. Someone paints their picture and says, \u201cSee, this is the way it is.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nPaint a new picture. This is what will free you.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIs this just a fancy way of saying change your ideas and you\u2019ll change your life? It kind of sounds like that, but you know me, and that I\u2019m not much into that, but will feel I must be off on a new mission if you want me to be.<\/span><\/p>\nYou have got to knock off that old way of thinking. I am no should sayer. I am not your Father. I will never tell you that you must anything. Do not give those qualities to me and don\u2019t desire them from anyone else. Don\u2019t you see that what has arisen has arisen from this very kind of desire? What \u201cmust\u201d I do to be happier, healthier, wealthier? Isn\u2019t this the common question? With the common emphasis on \u201ctell me what to do.\u201d Then someone tells you what you should do and the whole cycle repeats itself\u2026the cycle of wrong and right ways, of experts and seekers, of should sayers and rebels.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nYou have asked. I am your friend. I know you intimately. I know your friends intimately. The whole stringy, straggly, bunch of you are so close \u2013 so close to my heart \u2013 so close to finding your own way, so close to true altruism of spirit, to the kind of giving of yourselves, giving yourselves over to vision that the world needs. See in your questions, in your desire for quick relief, in your desire for clarity to be given, the remnants of the old way. At the same time, refuse to see this denial of the hierarchy of divinity to mean that you are not accompanied and, in that accompaniment, aided by way of strength and grace for what is yours to do.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nWhat is freely given is not this thing of gift as you perceive of it, not a bestowing on one of one gift and on one of another, not so much a thing of destiny or of one being an artist and one a writer and on and on. Those all are parts of life that are there and yet looked at inaccurately, particularly in the idea of bestowing.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nGifts or talents are not there in form, but only in experience.<\/i><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nWhat blessings have you received from me that came of form? Any? You like to think your woods and cabin were miracles of divine intervention and so, although we need to wrap up for now, I will say a small bit about intercession and intervention.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI don\u2019t want to leave you with the idea of no assistance, no comfort, but only of something asked of you. Yet you must see that in what is asked of you is the assistance and comfort given. The same is true of me. When you come to me, when you ask, you reveal yourself to me in your own way. You tell me of what\u2019s concerning you as you see it. I may see it quite differently.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nLike any friend, you honor me with your story, and by sharing matters of your heart. Like any friend, brother or sister, I have every inclination to help and not to hurt. All friends ponder the difference of what advice they can give, or what assistance, or how much truth they can tell to fit the circumstance of their friend. You have worried that you\u2019re not good about this and that you overstep your bounds at times.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nWhen you do this and call this worry, you are only looking at it from an angle that doesn\u2019t serve you well, because like all things you call \u201cworry,\u201d you then relegate it to a place where you both think of it too much and avoid the sort of alchemy of wisdom-making that is inherent within your internal desire. This is akin to this thorny issue you are putting before me. You have asked for help. How much help do I give? This is thorny even for me, prickly for every relationship of love, as there is a balancing of freedom with what can be given in times of need.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nThere is the old saying \u201cteach a person how to fish,\u201d and this is not quite like that, but it has elements of it only because you have not fully embraced your freedom and your power, which is why I tell you to Paint the Picture and to trust that I will be beside you, aiding you in ways that make it easier for you, but without treading on your freedom while it is so nascent within you. I see intercession as a way of putting a buffer between you and your struggles rather than ridding you of them.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIntervention is about crisis, as you know. It\u2019s what friends do as a last resort when one of their own is becoming lost to them. You step in, even if the friend wants no help and is openly resistant to it, and it happens rarely, maybe not ever in an entire lifetime of crises. This is due to the respectful relations that make friends friends, a respect of another\u2019s path and their right to choose and to flounder and to make mistakes, the very rights we\u2019re reinstating in our new picture of goodness. Yet even then, even in such last-resort acts, what is bound to happen?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nYou will ask something of your friend.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIt is not nearly so much, if at all, about what you will or can give your friend, as it is about what you, as a friend, and only as a friend, can ask in deepest friendship and love.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nAnd so, we are back to the asking being the way to comfort and assistance \u2013 in a very mutual way. You might say\u2026<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nOh, please, please, come back from wherever you\u2019ve gone if you can. I miss you, I\u2019m awaiting you, I\u2019m holding my breath for your return, I\u2019ll do whatever little I can to help you, but what can I do but ask, plead, beg, that you please, please turn away from whatever dark notions of yourself have made you cold and like stone to me, and open your heart again to the love that I want so desperately to give and to feel again coming from you, because you are not, not lost, not this stone, those cold eyes aren\u2019t yours, whatever you\u2019re in the grips of isn\u2019t you.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nAnd here is where you might see a spark in the cold eyes or where you don\u2019t, and where you know, whether you admit to yourself or not, that nothing you can say will have effect or that it might. Here is the willingness or unwillingness that stands behind the stone revealed and it can be a stone of greed as easily as a stone of lack, of arrogance as much as of humiliation. Oh, if you were only to confront those with arrogance and greed in their hearts as readily as you do those who have walled themselves away for their tenderness.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nA thing of wisdom I can tell you is that if you ask the tender to come to your aide and give you something that only they can give, they will rise like a feather on the wind, and lightly, as if on tiptoes, do the giving, no matter how high their wall of self-protection.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nGreed and arrogance are walls of self-protection too and they hide many tender souls even if the walls seem impenetrable, and sometimes are \u2013 not merely for unwillingness, but for fear \u2013 and here the greedy fall behind the meek because their greed is a thing of fear, and of self-doubt.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nSo, what happens when you are asked a thing as hard and as simple as opening your heart to love, or letting a vision you already possess flow through you into expression? What happens is that you wrestle to the ground your own fears, you dismantle your walls, you rise like a feather on the wind \u2013 or you don\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nYour decision or choice is to believe or disbelieve that I know the capacities of those I ask, and to respond however you are drawn to respond. You ask small things of those whose fears are large, large things of those whose fears are small, with nothing but love and respect for what comes of your request and empathy for the challenge it may be to step past doubt for the rising that will lighten your step and cause your feet to fall on hallowed ground.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nDo you not know that this is true for what has been asked of you and how holy it has made the ground to your feet so that your feet honor the earth and the mud? Do you not know this asking as a far reach from self-aggrandizement and do you not know the act of answering as a true act of humility? Did you not have your woods and your cabin come to you, not as miracles that were freaks of nature but as ways of cooperation so that there was a bit of timing and of money and of opportunity coming together at the right time in a way that felt miraculous and that yet was the result of your own brave actions? Your faith, your own faith made manifest?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nAnd so, do not look sideways at being asked. Look straight on and into the heart of the asker and the picture will be clear.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And Jesus Came Again If you\u2019ve read the last entry from 2006<\/a>, you\u2019ll see that Jesus seemed to be asking me to release myself from all ventures and to stay in solitude. For the most part I did so, and in the coming two years, I wrote both Creation of the New and The Given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":101,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-463","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/463\/revisions\/465"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariperron.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}