From the Creative Ethers
All things have a Divine origin and are sent forth to serve in the great Cosmic unfoldment. When, like ourselves, they have been 'away from home' a long time, it is often difficult to recognise the original product buried as it is beneath a scarred, battered and bent exterior. Nevertheless it contrives to hold on to the glimmerings of the 'image'.
Evolution helps us, through experience, to eliminate the soft and dangerous dross from our make-up thus helping us to become safer and more reliable. But it is he odd bits which we have dodged around, covered up with some pious platitude that constitute our greatest danger.
As our power to give and live increases, so do we empower all that is within our basic natures and as though seen through a magnifying lass, that which we thought was insignificant is shown as a festering and unhealed sore upon the substance of our soul.
It is quite a shock to be revealed to ourselves as we really are. How can we carry on while these weaknesses, these untried and untested parts of our nature are still with us? So, down from the heights we must come every now and then to forget our dreams of the angelic, the near holy, and roll up our sleeves, enter the primal workshop and like the blacksmith, kindle anew the ashes of past strivings. Now we must remove the soft, untempered basic weakness which has been exposed and left behind in the forging of our better values and feelings. This call-back to cleanup and repair some neglected part of our astral background can, if we are proud, be a humiliating and depressing experience. But we should not see it this way and we should be infinitely grateful that a higher power is sufficiently interested in our well-being that we have been made to go back and repair the hole which might otherwise sink the ship at a later date. We should welcome the experiences whatever they may be which will give us the opportunity of doing just that.
These higher powers know, from experience, the stresses and strains that lie ahead upon the road of service. The temptations and the pitfalls and know too that none but those who have repaired the weak place in their makeup can weather the storms of life. The tempting of Jesus was his initiation and triumph over the astral and primal desire forces. As so with us, for every part of our spiritual equipment must be tried and tested and not found to be wanting before it is deemed wise to allow us to proceed further along the road and be given greater spiritual responsibility.
It is well-known that a chain is as strong as its weakest link, so that no matter how spiritually strong or evolved we are, so long as there is an untried weakness within our nature, it will surely be our undoing unless we have the courage to retrace our footsteps and enter conditions which will help us to strengthen it. This will cause much soul searching, condemnation and often spiritual indignation , for often we are ignorant (temporarily) of the reason for the lessons life tries to teach us. It is so easy to blame the teacher (life) when it is , in fact, our own pride or indolence which causes us pain in the learning.
We can be so blinded by 'doing good' that we forget or lose sight of our own shortcomings. In cases of this kind of outcome, if we are not careful, we find ourselves blaming any short-weight on God. Then, with noses in the air, off we stamp shouting that there is no justice, that obviously the bad is more powerful than the good and instead of faith, we harbor disillusion.
All this indicates we are very much in need of the medicine which is administered by earth's adverse experiences. And so we shall probably go on receiving 'raps across the knuckles' until we have repaired the weakness. We have been told that 'truth shall set us free' and indeed to get on good terms with truth is to save ourselves and others a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Things must change. The law of evolution insists upon forward movement . Uniformity and freedom are incompatible. We are not fashioned to be automatons. If we try to compress our natures into fixed patterns, our mental health will be undermined. We should accept the overall order of things, quietly get along with our own assignment, being prepared to take a refresher course occasionally and not lose our sense of humour. Let us stop seeing everything as important, ourselves especially, and trust a little more in the Wisdom and Power of God and a little less in our own opinions. We shall then take less our of life and put a little more into it.
This must be, for eventually the pupil must become the teacher and it is for us the acquire the humility to take and enjoy stronger medicine that we give out.
God chastises those He loves - in other words if we are selected for special duties it is necessary for us to be trained. The saints of the future will not be those who lead pious lives but those who, with sleeves rolled up who have smudges of effort on their faces, their feet on mother earth and who work where they are most wanted, fearing no trial because they have, through often painful experience strengthened their weaknesses' This is surely God's Wisdom in action.