The Real You

Wear your heart on your sleeve, even if it means you might get hurt- this way, everyone will know the real you and will love you or hate you based on the truth. If you're always on stage, if every conversation is a show and a performance meant to make you look as good and polished as possible, in the end who will really know you? No one, not even yourself. All of your relationships and friendships, once the mask comes off, will come crashing down like a house of cards.

Hall of Souls

We are not forgotten. If at times you feel lost, as I do, just remember He has numbered even the hairs on your head- and remembered them. The 20th century writer and prophet Edgar Cayce once wrote that God has a great "Hall of Records", a spiritual library with the names of every soul that has ever lived or who ever will live. There, watching and loving us each moment of our turning and twisting lives, He waits patiently for us to return to Him where we belong. We are most certainly never forgotten.

The Outer Gates

No matter how far away we stray from God, we are never totally separated from Him. That is not to say that our distance from the Lord will have no effect on us. How could it not? We will lose protections, our hearts will slowly become cold and less able to love, and we may even begin to get the ridiculous notion that we can survive on our own without Him in our lives. Just as the lonely outer planets of our solar system rely less and less on the sun the farther away they orbit from it, we too become colder, darker, with less and less light and very little signs of life. But even there, in the vast darkness of space, so far from the warmth of the sun, it still influences them . . . whether they take note of it or not.

Great Expectations

Don't be discouraged when others let you down or even disappoint you, for it could be that they have given all they had within them to give. We are all at different places of growth as spirits, and at times I think we may expect too much of people. Put God first above all things, above all people, and you may find that He can move mountains. Just as we have been let down by others, no doubt we have let down friends or loved ones over the years because we were asked to reach further than we could at the moment. Do not fear, for as we begin to strengthen in faith and love and rely more and more on Him, all other things can be redeemed and made right again. The thing we were reaching for and knew we'd never be able to touch, once turned over to Him and forgotten, suddenly is in our grasp.

The Smallest of Hands

And all the times you stretched but could not reach, all the friends you had but lost or who were taken from you too soon, or who simply drifted away; those little, seemingly insignificant, forgotten moments of life that almost no one knows about or understands but you- the ones that stay in your soul and your heart forever with no place to go- even these things He shall restore and make right again one day. A fresh, cool mountain rain is coming. As e.e. Cummings once wrote, "I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens, only something in me understands, the voice of eyes that is deeper than all roses. Nobody . . .not even the rain, has such small hands."