Just Be True, The Third Sphere & I Heart God

Confession: I wrote this post and then had to go back and edit it. I was trying so hard to express my passion and the deep significance I feel in this realization that almost every second word was italicized or bolded or underlined, or everything all at once! I have reigned myself in a bit. I hope all the emphasis help you read it, and not distract you. (See I even need an underline here! I also talk with my hands when I’m really passionate. Hand talking must be italics translated.)

Warning: this is a long post… it’s sort of more an essay. I’m trying to work on succinct as a concept!

By way of introduction can I say I feel that many of you are going to be tempted to feel what I am saying here is obvious. I probably would have said the same a little while ago but I now see that I really wasn’t getting it at all. The only way I can explain it is to say that I knew the principles but had no concept of what they felt like in action.

It is where the emotional teachings of this Path truly meet the God part. It is the understanding of how the two are irrevocably intertwined and always have been. This deeper understanding is still fairly fresh in its re-awakening to me. I’m still holding it close to my heart, hoping that it will find a home there where it can take hold and flourish. Because of this I’m feeling fairly feeble as I try to do the explaining of it justice. Hopefully, if you open your heart, God can shine the light on the spaces I miss. My words really can’t compare to His Wisdom but maybe they can open a doorway.

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A new day was just beginning and I, sitting on the floor of our ecotent, looking out on all the freshness, was reading the Padgett messages….

“Be true to yourself and you will soon be in God’s love and favour…”[1]

The message continued but I found myself drawn to these words. I scribbled them in my journal and kept reading.

Again I paused; I looked back to my journal and circled the first four words in the sentence. These are well worn words in our world, bandied about in all kinds of situations. But now here they were at the beginning of a sentence that Helen had impressed upon her beloved mate. There was something big there that I was missing. I could feel it. It was niggling at the edge of my understanding.

“Be true to yourself…” – no don’t brush these words aside as obvious for their true meaning is huge.

“Be true…” to what you feel right now, surrender to your emotion, embody it, allow it. Don’t act it out, or avoid, don’t analyze or understand it. Just be true.

It hits me, a dawning no less significant than the one unfolding around me.

To know God’s Love I must go to Him in Truth. Go to Him in the truth of what I feel, just be true…

Yes I know you’ve heard all this before. But have you really? I hadn’t understood it – in my marrow. I didn’t feel what it meant deep within me.

Lots of us feel we must be in truth to receive the Love but do we go to Him in our messiness and sorrow. How can He connect to us if we do not share ourselves with Him, how can we relate to Him if we avoid the state of complete humility and honesty about our own selves?

In all of my talking, journaling, channelling, processing and yes, even blogging I’ve been missing the point. I’ve been seeking to figure out my feelings instead of just embodying them while I cry out to God for Love and Grace. This revelation of my own smug self reliance stings me. The sin as old as mankind itself, has kept me in its grips. In all of my struggles to free myself of emotional error I have overlooked the arrogance in the way I am approaching the entire process.

I’ve been trying to sort myself and my feelings out so that then God can Love me, (now this sounds ridiculous but only if I remember that God is a Loving Parent who accepts me just as I am, and I forget that most of the other people in my childhood wanted me to hold it together and sort things out, and they found me far more ‘loveable’ and adorable then).

I haven’t been asking God for Grace or for Love, for I haven’t believed myself worthy of such things. I’ve been asking for Him to help to me feel – pleading and needy sometimes. And yet I’ve been afraid of His Love and of truly opening my heart to share my feelings with Him.

I haven’t understood that I must use my will to feel and He will use His Will to ease my burden.

I realise now that in order to truly heal I must take my whole self to Him and say ‘Here I am, teach me to love myself just as I am. In this precious, imperfect moment of my existence show me I am worthy. Let me feel your Love.’

My fear and desperate desire for control has made me, in my heart (the place where true longing begins) resist His Love because of what it may dislodge in me. I have been guarding my worthlessness from Him.

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It occurs to me that this is the true transition to the third sphere, or some big step in love, where I stop trying to ‘figure out’ my emotion, and instead am just willing to surrender to it, whatever it is, and to trust God to heal me of it – through His process, not mine. It is the place in which I am willing to be, just be, in the truth of my emotions[2] (not my addictions) and to experience them, at all times.

It is vulnerability – the lesson of my year – that is required. It is saying to God  “I’m terribly afraid that you may reject me but I can’t do this without you. But in order to do it with you I’m going to have to share myself. I’m going to have to ask, really ask for your Love.”

“Man has a will to either accept or reject the Love of God, and until he exercises his will in a way to show that he wants that love, it will not be given him.”[3]

God, I haven’t wanted your Love. I’ve asked for guidance and for courage but I haven’t wanted Love.

I have paid lip service to your Love and haven’t yet yearned for it, in the way of a winsome, lovesick teenager, of a mother for her lost child, of a son for his absent father.. his Father.

I haven’t unlocked the desire that consumes a soul, that is in the heart beat behind every action, present with every word and flavours every minute.

I quake at the thought of unleashing my sheer, unadulterated longing, that my heart may run free and ‘into Your Arms of Love’.

Could I give you my heart God? All the lost and fragile pieces of me, could I offer them up to you? Could I want Your Love so much that I would face all fear and give up all my feeble attempts, these shameful human encounters where I try to earn approval and appreciation, all in an effort to find a substitute for the Love that would fulfill me complete.

In the early dawn, in my dawning, I realize that I have focused on the eradication of sin and error and neglected (because of unworthiness and fear of grief) the inflowing of God’s Love. And now I see that the fastest way to eradicate sin and error is to focus on the Love. The process of emotional, causal release will be the same but it will happen as a natural part of my relationship with God. It is sharing with God in complete humility that changes our soul. When we truly open ourselves God’s Love gives us courage to step into the depths of pain and She takes the cause from us. The gentle surgeon removes the barbs. It is a process with my Maker – not a trial I must endure before I can relate to Her.

It seems to me in our initial unraveling we do and perhaps we must, engage our intellect. God does seem to many of us a far off figure, shrouded in misconception borne of our upbringing and background. We cannot neglect the important work of unhooking from our re-framing and rethinking, and the breaking down of the addictions that have run our lives. This next step though is the substance of the teachings. All of the thrashing around beforehand is just us lost in the bush, trying to orientate ourselves. This realization is suddenly stepping into the clearing and seeing the luminous Path stretch out in front of us. We must each have our awakening of what is truly within us.. just be true.. and be willing to share this self with God.

‘…for until such an awakening comes to (the soul) there is no possibility of it receiving the Love of God into to it..’[4]

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“When we pray to the Father for an increase in faith, it is a prayer for the increase in Love”[5]

If  I block the Love, how can my faith grow?

It ALL depends on the Father’s Love.

I AM NOTHING WITHOUT HIS LOVE.

As I read my notes to Yeshua, he hastens to correct my last statement. It is not true that I am nothing without God’s Love. I can become God’s creation, perfected in natural love. I explain to him that when I wrote the statement I was feeling so acutely how limited I am without this relationship, how insignificant I now am compared to what I once was when His Love made me His child ‘in substance and not in image only’ In my moments of explaining its hard to contemplate how I could even grow in natural love without the Love of God.

And yet in the next breath, I feel the errors of the first human couple still alive within me – this searing, desperate attempt to prove that I am something and someone, on my own, of my own creation. The utter limitation of this state, of trying to have my ego prove its worth, overwhelms me. I’m locked in a futile struggle to prove my value, that blocks the most significant relationship of my life.

Even now, the idea that me, alone;

without doing good works,

without saying smart things,

without knowing,

without showing that I am worthy,

the idea that I am loved and am beautiful without any of these things is so alien. I feel I must make good before He (and he) can love me, before I show myself to Him.

And yet His Love will prove His Love for me.

But I must have humility and openness to receive it.

If I am needy or demanding I won’t receive it. My neediness is a plea that he make it easier so that I may avoid my darkest sorrow. My demand is anger and expectation that I should be able to avoid vulnerability and openness with Him. Instead I must ask ‘with sincere longings and earnest aspiration’, I must truly desire it and be willing to bare my whole self to Him, in recognition that:

“Man is a mere creature and cannot create anything higher than himself; so man cannot rise to the nature of the divine, unless the divine first comes into that man and makes him a part of its own divinity.”[6]

It’s not about saying “God help me feel….”

It is saying “God I feel….”

“God please be with me while I feel.”

“Could you show me your love so that I may have faith enough to step into the darkness?”

It is stopping trying and simply desiring – desiring God, desiring Love, desiring Truth, desiring emotion.

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So why am so I afraid to ignite my yearning for God and for Soulmate? So afraid that I hold myself back in the second sphere (and sometimes lets face it, right down in the lower first) – figuring out, analyzing, resisting surrender to the truth of what I feel….

The answer, the reason for my headstrong self-reliance, is that I don’t want to soften into the feelings that for nigh on 2000 years I have relied on a Father of Love. He has guided me. And the love of my mate has nourished me.

I can’t take the next steps until I acknowledge this – that my Mother God sustains me and that my mate, Yeshua, completes me.

I feel so nothing without them. And it feels that I must pass through this abyss of knowing that, feeling that nothing, in order to have them with me again.

I have missed them so much that it terrifies me to crack open the cache of my longing, and have all of my loneliness tumble out with it.

Oh God give me strength…

    dare I ask….   show me Love?

This is the narrow way.

It must be through a relationship with God. Until we have this we are not truly on the Path. We are bumbling along, preparing, removing our blocks, until we reach the point where we are ready to open ourselves to the greatest, most life-givng Love there is – until we are ready to enter a love relationship with our Creator.

I am humbled to admit to you this morning that I have been dallying all this time, on the Natural Love Path. Yes, I have felt and released some emotions and I have come to know the Father a little. But I am hit like a freight train by the understanding that my growth has been seriously stunted by my unwillingness to ‘ask in a way that shows I want His Love’.

My friends, we must learn what it means to ask Him.

To ask with our hearts,

our whole hearts,

our broken hearts,

our shameful hearts,

the parts of us that don’t feel whole because in Truth they lack

His Love.

We must unearth the parts of us left in the shadows and corners and forgotten caverns in our souls so that She may shine the light of Love and Truth upon them.

I saw a book advertised the other day. It is called 'Made to Crave' by Lysa Terkeurst. I haven’t read the book but the short blurb I read about it came back to me as I finished writing this post. I think I’ve gleaned her basic premise (apologies to Lysa If I’m wrong) It is this: We are all made to crave God and all of our other addictions with food, (and I would add with television, in relationships, in our work etc, etc), are just distractions and a poor substitute for the Love we crave the most.

If we want to know God, to receive Her Love, we must open up to our craving and know it for what it is. When we do this our addictions will become unsatisfying and meager in comparison to what awaits us. And this craving and desire will inspire us to face our fears, to face our true selves and expose them to the One who Loves the most. When we do, God in all Her Grace, will clean us and teach us Love.

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[1] Excerpt from a message received by James Padgett from Helen Padgett, November 30^th, 1914

[2] I want to make a clear distinction here between living in or allowing our emotions and living in addictive emotions. The first is healing, the second is damaging and even more damaging when we tell ourselves and others we are doing the first when we are in fact doing the second. I see many living in addictive emotions and crying non-causal feelings. While we live in addiction we cannot connect to our true emotional state.

[3] Excerpt from a message received by James Padgett from Ann Rollins, December 12^th, 1914

[4] Excerpt from a message received by James Padgett from Yeshua, October 10^th, 1915

[5] Excerpt from a message received by James Padgett from Yeshua, March 2^nd, 1916

[6] Excerpt from a message received by James Padgett from Yeshua, January 24^th, 1915