Get In the Bath With Your Shirt On

Get In the Bath With Your Shirt On

by Brother Mandus

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I am sure that no one of us here has any difficulty in believing that we are in the presence of God, and that the presence of God is revealing His presence to each of us. You can feel it in this stillness that always comes when people forgather to pray.

And I believe in all simplicity that in this precious moment all the heavens have opened. That all the glory of the Lord shines in and around and all about us. I believe that when we are centered in prayer like this, the Lord draws aside the curtains of our souls and the imprisoned splendor comes shining up like a great fountain of goodness.

And I believe that since with our mortal vision you cannot see the brilliance of the glory of God, it manifests to us in this stillness. And someday, I also believe, we’re all of us going to take much more notice of something so simple as a stillness, and extend our vision and recognition and faith to interpret the deep peace of God as that presence flowing through mind and soul and body and circumstance, harmonizing it, dissolving the tensions in peace.

We shall learn to, in a state of turmoil, discord, pressure, dis-ease, conflict, all the unhappiness situations, which always represent some state of chaos or disturbance or discord, tension, we’ll learn to use our common sense. And say, “My word, if I am in a state of jangled nerves or pressure or disease or whatever, then this is my soul yelling at me, telling me, it’s time to come and expose yourself to the peace of God.”

It is such a ridiculously simple answer that we don’t take too much notice of it. And yet it’s common sense when you think about it. Peace is the opposite of chaos. Period. That’s an Americanism. Period. When I go home, I often find myself making some declamation. Period.

And they sort of look at me, and then I say, well, I’m sorry. And so this entire movement of God in us is something so utterly simple that perhaps the greatest tragedy on earth is that we’ve lost that sense of simplicity because we have grown up in a generation, particularly in our lifetime, where everything in our education, in our technology, and everything we are doing is trying to kid us along that the biggest things in life are complex. Yet the greatest thing of all, that of coming to the Father, you will never find by complexity. You’ll never find it by juggling your mind and hoping someday you’ll reach such heights that you’ll allow that or contain that infinite spirit of the Lord. It’s so simple. It’s so simple. If we believe in simplicity.

But it’s downright difficult if we believe that simplicity is difficult. Because the mind is your… The mind is the most tricky thing that you ever have, you know. In fact, it’s the only thing you’ve got, but it’s tricky. It gets you into confusion. It regulates your life. This is the center through which God has to operate if He can drag you apart to let Him come in. Because you are a creature of free will. You are born into the world to learn how to use this miracle of consciousness, how to use this creative power that is vested in us, and subsequently to learn how to integrate it with the Spirit of Christ, that the mind that is in Christ may come and cover our mind and release into action the dynamics of God in a partnership creation that will lead us to heights as yet undreamed of. All right, we’re little children yet. Nobody’s perfect. We’re only beginning to learn about these things. But by the same token, don’t forget that we’re in a very wonderful position again now. Something as wonderful as it was in the days of the early church, when these simple people believed in this simplicity, believed in this love that Jesus taught, and simply launched out with an exuberance of that outpouring love of God.

And of course, they lived in an age of signs and wonders until human intellect crowded it out. And we’re learning again. But we’re learning again. Not finding a new truth, but learning again to believe in that truth and implement it as the most practical thing in life. And I think it’s the most refreshing thing that’s happened in hundreds and hundreds of years. Because, thank God, it’s bringing us back to a basic simplicity in the days of our greatest stress and strain and complexity as this exploding intellect, which must be part of God’s will too, but this exploding intellect with its mind powers always projecting greater and greater achievement and therefore creating greater and greater complexity. A complexity that now turns out to be so great that you cannot even regulate it without divine assistance. Man without God is a catastrophe. Man without vision is lost. And anyone who thinks you can safely walk, especially in these next 50 years, just working it out in your own brilliance and relying upon that brilliance may very well be the beginning of the end of a civilization. And so it is very refreshing, it seems to me, that after all this entire business of communing with God never was intended to be something too difficult for everybody. In fact, in the light of what I found myself, I would say that if our Christianity, in whatever form we are expressing it, is too complicated for a little girl in a jungle in Africa who can’t even read or write, then it’s too complicated.

I think too many of us are trying to find this kingdom, are trying to find the know-how or the technical way of making a breakthrough into it, and we forgot all about the Father who is right there in the midst, forever seeking to ease us into an awareness of His presence. It is we who are trying to do the works instead of letting the Lord do them with us and for us. And I think we get too rigid, and very often too dogmatic, about how God shall work, which system is the best one. We’ve seen much conflict across the Christian scene, which again, thank God, is beginning to break down. We’re finding a new sense of tolerance, a new awareness, that God moves in all people, everywhere on earth.

Nobody could ever convince me that if a man is born in China, or India, or Africa, or Britain, or the United States, of any race or color or creed, no one can convince me that God didn’t have a hand in it.

And because everything and everyone must have been created by the Father, then we just better get with His vision and His purpose concerning that creation. And if we’re going to be Christians at all, we are certainly going to have to lift our sights of love to levels beyond the levels of ordinary custom, beyond the levels of ordinary observance, and say, “Well, never mind, I’m going to look at life through Christ’s vision.”

Because, apart from anything else, with a population explosion flowing into the world, in which perhaps in the next 30, 40 years, you will have twice as many people on earth as there are now, with all the attendant, multiplying problems of food and water and living space, with a great thrust coming from the East, somehow, somewhere, there’s going to have to be a Christian bridgehead across into other nations, other ideologies, other theologies, on some level of tolerance, a mutual respect for each other’s life, and a mutual willingness to share what we might have to help somebody who doesn’t have, and they sharing with us what we might not have. Because otherwise, you’re going to be involved in a conflict so desperate that all our abhorrent civilization may dissolve in utter chaos. And I just don’t believe that’s God’s intention. Of course it isn’t. The Father never makes a mistake. If there’s a multiplying population, this is to stretch us, to hold a vision of a kind of brotherhood that can handle it. It’s there to stretch our technology in ways whereby we can produce greater works in this greater age for the well-being of everybody else. I cannot subscribe to a belief that God is making a mistake. And that is why I don’t think anyone in our day and age, certainly people with any spiritual vision, I don’t think any of us are being asked just to be Christians, still walking, in any kind of apathy.

I don’t think we even get Christianity off the ground until we ourselves, and starting always with the individual, until we ourselves find a new aspect of discipleship in which we become expendable in the human cause, in which we are not coming to God to see what we can get out of Him to bolster up our own lives a bit more and wrap us around with a bit more prosperity and cotton wool and what have you, but rather, “What can I do for You, Father? This day, stretch me, Lord.

“Help me this day to do something nobler, more wonderful, more glorious for somebody else than I’ve done before.” Because, and I see it from another angle, that love, often held to be a bit sentimental out in the great big world, turns out to be the great creative dynamic of life itself, turns out to be the center of all healing, turns out to be that power when it is floodlighting a mind, transforms a negative thinker into a positive thinker, and therefore into a positive expression. And that this love is never something that you clutch to get coming this way. We’ve got it the wrong way around. Of course we all need loving.

But too often we think we need loving more than we think we need to love. And I uphold the Christ way, that His divine intention for all of us is to learn how to love and love and love and love until our souls are singing the very songs of heaven and releasing that joy into everyday expression. For then the love that is released, yes, it comes back to you automatically, in the right way. Again, for your highest good as God sees it. For love is not a possessive factor at all. It is a giving way aspect. The giving of the life for somebody else and for the Father. But you give your life best to God when you’re giving it towards life, towards people, towards your work, towards your business, towards your family, towards anything and everybody entwined in your consciousness.

Well, you don’t need me to tell you this. This word of Christ isn’t new. It’s a very strange thing, you know, that we could talk here all night about the wonders of the Christ way. But you know it all. You’ve read it all. And it’s almost strange that we should ever have to try to persuade ourselves about the reality of it. And yet, as always, when we talk about this, it quickens us in our consciousness.

Nevertheless, the only purpose of my talking to you, for example, is perhaps only to share something of experience which helps us to simplify this process and to become much more natural in our acceptance of God’s will, in our acceptance of God’s outpouring good. And to focus our minds upon the tremendous dynamic of your own being, your own personality, in the expression of God’s purpose designed by Him to advance the whole in the environment where you find yourself and extended in that consciousness right across the world. We are being asked to arise out of our littleness to be so established in the greatness of Christ, not egotistically at all, but in such a state of mind which embraces the allness of God moving in every situation. So we bear witness to the power of Christ operating in us, that we are being made possible by our own total simplicity and our own total willingness to love to maximum that He might cover any other weakness with His strength. I think we have to be more natural with each other. I think we have to understand that every facet and aspect of personality is part of a divine manifestation.

We have to remember when we are dealing with the great serious things of life, how to find divine healing for some terrible thing that has hit us, how to solve the problems of the world, how to deal with the complexities of business and so forth. Being very serious minded when we turn our attention to the Lord, I think you’ve got to be careful too. I think you have to remember that when the movement of God’s love comes in, one of the central purposes of that is to relax us, to release us from tensions, to let us spill over of joy. Look how Jesus talks about joy. To let joy come shining up. To let laughter come shining up. To let the mind be in a state of such abandoned joy that there is the power of that love always shining through without any restriction whatsoever. And when you stop to think about it, you can see so clearly that the mind is that which God also has to use in order to produce whatever it is that He has designed. He has to work and is limited by the personality of each individual. According to the degree of our vision or our faith or our recognition, so can the Father come and move. If you say, “Well, I wish I had more faith,” you’re really saying, “Well, of course, I only have a little bit of faith at this minute, so of course I can only let a little bit of Your wonderful power come shining through, Father.”

Which isn’t what you really meant or wanted. Isn’t it better to set up the pattern, “Well, Lord, I don’t know much about anything, but isn’t it wonderful that You do? Thank You very much, Father. I have complete trust and perfect faith in Your living presence here and Your ability to lead me upward and onward through every difficulty to fulfill whatever it is that You want me to do.”

Isn’t it simpler to abandon one’s mind to a total receptivity of God, whose purpose it is to express His own being, that He wants to do it more surely than we want to do it? Because He is a presence. And it seems to me that we talk of the omnipresence of God, for example. And we say words that go through our minds without pausing to recognize the significance of them. For goodness sake, if all the presence of God is here and it’s omnipresent, then surely I’ve got to contemplate that presence of God in my mind, in my body, even in every cell of my finger, if you like. In the air here and the air there, and not more of God there than there is here.

And the simplicity of Jesus, “I am with you always,” means that. Well, isn’t it easy then to say, “Well, isn’t it wonderful I don’t have to look for You, Lord? You’ve been listening to my thoughts ever since You breathed Your life into me. It’s marvelous, Lord, to think that I can just let go and accept or acknowledge and open my free will consciousness to let Your love come shining in.”

For when you seek to analyze it, you are a mind, not a body. You are a mind. You live in consciousness. Whatever consciousness is, and who in the world can tell you what that is? Do you know what your mind is? Do you know how you think?

Do you know what makes it possible for you to move this body? Or to write a letter? Nobody knows. We only know that we have this extraordinary faculty. I don’t even know how I talk to you. I haven’t a clue. But in some mysterious way, it is a possibility. But everything we do is a mental experience. Everything that ever happens to us happens in consciousness.

We think corresponding action takes place. If we have our thinking all disturbed, you’ll get a disturbed body too. And a disturbed relationship, very likely. Things start to go wrong when our consciousness is operating in a distorted kind of way. Unlovingness will produce chaos all around you, as well as disturb your metabolism. Joy will spread.

How does that mind work? In this camp, as you walk around, you’ll see people smiling at one another. Or whatever in the world is a smile. How do you smile? What is it? What does it represent? Here’s this thing called a face going like this.

Reflecting something that is jiggling about in your mind. What makes you laugh? What is laughter? Ha. And what is it? I don’t know. Some extraordinary eruption or something in the mind. And out comes this funny noise through you. We have in Blackpool.

And laughter is very healing, you know. Wonderful healing properties in laughter. It loosens you up, it warms you up, it makes you feel good. Heavens, I’m sure, if we could all laugh all day long, we wouldn’t get sick. We stop laughing when something comes along, you see. Well, we, in Blackpool, Blackpool, incidentally, is the largest vacation resort in the British Isles. So, oh, millions of people come there on vacation. It’s a town or a city of thousands of hotels. And we have a vast fairground. What do you call that pleasure resort you have in New York? Coney Island. Coney Island. We have a better one.

And right, would you believe it? Some genius, a bit of genius in Britain, too, you know. Some genius put right bang in the center of this fairground, a clown, which in the summer season is thronged with thousands of people milling about. They put in a great big glass case, a clown, about twice the size of normal stature. It’s a moving clown. And right across this fairground, this clown has a recording of laughter. And it’s going…

Like this, all day long and all night. And it’s the most interesting thing because all around this clown, there’s thousands of people, all laughing. And those thousands of people probably go home and say, “Boy, we had a good holiday in Blackpool. The air was marvelous.” They had a good laugh. That’s what healed them.

But you see, doesn’t it feel good to laugh? And nobody knows what it is. And yet it’s the mind that is laughing. The invisible you that is laughing. There’s something in the center of you that’s spilling over with some kind of joy. Which in turn is infectious. Notice this aspect of it. Cheerfulness, happiness, love, good fellowship are very infectious. They spread and wrap us all around and make us all feel warm and good inside. And when you feel warm and good inside, that’s when you are at your best. That’s when the troubles get out into the background. That’s when Satan goes for a trip somewhere. That’s when you feel that you can really cope. Because the spillover makes you feel good towards your neighbor. And if your neighbor is laughing with you, then you’ve got a fellowship that is very powerful. It’s very healing. I merely point to it as part of the mystery of consciousness. And yet a very important part of it. And a part in spiritual things that is often quite a bit neglected. Now I’m not talking about CFOs, because one of the genius factors in CFO work is this very fellowship of which I’m talking. We are here to be relaxed. We’re here to establish closer fellowship. And you will have noticed already in this camp.

As you’ve walked around, people are laughing. People are happy. People are talking. People are in good rapport, good fellowship with one another. And this is as important an aspect of the Christian way of life, perhaps the most important maybe, as important as any study techniques which, though necessary of course, the study brings the serious side. But if you end up by being a Christian with a long face who never smiles, who’s always saying, all closed up like this, then you can be sure there’s some rigidity that needs warming up in some way.

And so we are finding so much of the Christ way in these natural ways. And the most natural way of all is indeed to love one another. Because the love brings a unity of purpose. And if you look across the entire world, you will see that practically every project in which mankind is engaged, from farming the fields, to great industries, the great offices, administration, the scientists in their laboratories, the wherever men, and women too, find themselves engaged with life, you’ll find them in fellowship with other people. Identified with some project. It’s part of the inbuilt system of God that we serve one another. And sometimes I think it’s a very salutary thing to realize that no matter how high our doctrine might be, as in a church or if we take a self-righteous attitude, it’s very salutary to remember that not even a church could exist upon earth, no matter how righteous or how high it might be, without the work of a lot of people who haven’t yet become even interested in spiritual principles. But the man who labors on the farm, the man who is at this very minute driving transport trucks across your country, the people who are going to be working all night, those who are working across the world even while we’re sitting here in God’s presence, all those people are just as important to God as we are or anybody else, whether they know the truth or not.

And this is the point we’ve got to get to because these are the bridgeheads we’ve got to find. And I would remind you that there are a lot of people outside there in the world who are isolated from the Christian field as much because they find it so fragmented, as much because they find things that just don’t square with their thinking as anything else. And I believe the Christian has to find that bridgehead with a new kind of love, a new kind of common sense, a new kind of willingness to go with the other man rather than, “Well, you’d better do it this way or else.” I think we’ve got to be very careful about self-righteousness lest we trample upon somebody whose soul is yearning to find a truth that can be lived. And that is why, in the end, the fullness of the Christ way cannot really be implemented until we find the love that is the common denominator factor of all living, until we find the simple faith that doesn’t demand anything of the other person, who doesn’t point a finger at somebody else’s mistakes or sins or judgment on them, because we understand in a common sense way that not one of us here is free from mistakes. And not one of us here will go the rest of our lives without making some mistakes either.

Either. And because we live in an age where these problems become acute, because we live in an age of great danger, an age where we are making a transition from ignorance and sin towards the higher level of consciousness which must match the exploding consciousness of intellect, the transition period is the period of great change because you cannot change from one system to another with the kind of rapidity that has come upon the world in the last hundred years without there being tremendous chaos, tremendous pressures and tremendous tensions, and tremendous mistakes. And so this is the danger period, the transition period. And it is people like you who are being asked to fit your vision to the vision of the new age and the kind of behavior patterns that shall be expressed in that age. It is you who are being asked to be the wayshower to those who are involved in this life situation. And I believe with all my heart while I admire the marvel and the wonder of human intellect and it’s one of the greatest things, particularly in our lifetime, the man has ever seen, for he knows now how to glean knowledge about almost anything and how to use it. And his intellect expands like this.

Whether it’s rocketry to the moon or computers or a thousand other aspects of the kind of technology and its results that you find in the United States and in Britain and Europe, this very factor is of divine intent too. It is part of the growth of man. But the danger is that if he rests in his own strength, and it is a danger because the more secure you are, the more you are able to mold the environment, the more you are able to wrap yourself around with a million dollars, the more you are able to create a way of life that brings you comfort and creativeness and so forth, the less likely are you to feel this urgent need for reliance upon God or upon the spiritual principles, upon the great love factor that must be basic to every kind of human expression if we are going to be balanced in the great creative way of Christ. And that is why this whole system needs to be leavened by those who see the truth. Because you are the light of the world. Don’t make any mistake about that. You are the light of the world just as quickly as you, the individual recognizing the significance of your own life, the miracle of your own life, the wonder of it, and arising yourself out of any kind of darkness or uncertainty or littleness into a new stature whereby your mind can be used by the almighty mind of the Lord to project these signs and wonders, these mightier works into the generation in which you find yourself.

There’s a very great world to be won. You will do it by being balanced in harmony and peace and love and laughter and joy and simplicity and in prayer which recognizes and allows the Lord to come shining into the midst.

When you see an age like this of great technology, of course marvel at it. Why, good gracious, I travel around your country, I see these things too and I marvel at them. And sometimes you can be brought back to a great technical simplicity too. Someone said, I think, that in the end it’s the simple thing that holds the central secret. It reminds me by job, I was in a camp, in the Pocono camp, in the Pocono Mountains, Camps Farthest Out. Some years ago, come to America and you’ll get it all. Here was I in this camp, you know, a man like myself has to, gets quite involved sometimes in washing shirts.

You know, and man like, I leave it until the last one is there and say, “Well, I’ve got to do something about this, quick.” Because I can’t bear to wear a shirt more than one day at a time. And so, quite often, you see me on my knees in front of the bath pummeling away at these shirts.

And then hanging the wretched things up, hanging the blessed thing, hanging these shirts up to dry. Until in the Pocono camp, one man said, having observed me in my bathroom, he said, “Well, you, that’s crazy, that, doing it that way. Well, sure,” he said, “there’s a much simpler way of washing shirts than that.” He said, “For goodness sake, why don’t you simply put the shirt on, get into the bath, turn the shower on, and…”

So you see what a technical age we live in. Sorry. But it is still true that even in the greatest sciences, the simple thing was often the key that brought the great vision. If ever you are struggling for an idea, if ever life grows desperate, if you don’t know where to turn, that’s your soul yelling for simplicity, to become still, to listen to the Lord, to let the Father bring you through to the next height, to take you into the victory that is always there. For I assure you that every problem that ever comes contains within itself its true solution as known by God for your highest and eternal good. If only we would believe that, we wouldn’t run away from the problems. We would say, “Oh good, here’s another one. Oh my word, look at this big thing coming. I must be growing in grace to be able to reach something as big as that.” And so you say, “Well, thank You, Father, now together let us deal with this one.” You’re doing it with joy. Now what do we do as Christians, honestly? We say, isn’t it wonderful? That prosperity principle work, look, there’s that other extra thousand dollars come in. We think that is a good experience. And the best of us are tempted to evaluate something that seems to stretch us, the problem, the difficulty, the sickness, the whatever.

We don’t like it. We hate it in fact. And if you hate even a problem it’ll grow on you and hold you in greater bondage. I think what we’re discovering is that you can’t afford to hate anything. You can’t afford to hate your body if it’s sick or the pain that might be there. You can’t afford to hate the house you live in or the people next door. You can’t afford to hate your work. If you hate your work even you’ll be a very poor workman. You’ll be frustrated, angry, irritable, a pain in the neck to the people you work with, and you’re possibly looking for an opportunity to get rid of you. You have to love everything, everyone, with an abandonment that doesn’t seek to evaluate why you’re doing it, except that this is the central principle of life. Because when love abounds, God is right there. Don’t put the idea of God in separate compartments. God is love. And who is to say, even though some of us might have great concepts about God, might sit on mountaintop experiences of God, who is to say which is the greater? That, or perhaps a warm, loving arm around some old lady’s shoulder, without even breathing a word about it, out of the sheer compassion of your heart.

For compassion is love in action. Prayer is released whenever anybody is loving towards somebody else. For that is the action of God. Prayer is released whenever you are. And so I believe, and perhaps we’ll talk some more about it later, as time goes awfully quickly when I stand up here, I think I want to leave just a thought in your mind. Perhaps we can just discuss it in some more detail later.

The thought that the only purpose of life in its evolution is increasingly to express God in that evolution. And by that I really mean to allow God to express His perfection in the midst of every situation that He wants you to deal with, that you may grow in that awareness and thus be a channel of His perfection into the whole environment, beginning with the one localized in you, but spreading right across the whole field. And that, significantly, the purpose of Christianity is to bring this truth into action in every field of human activity. And I would remind you that one of the most serious things and challenges confronting the Church and the individual Christian today is the fact that, broadly speaking, there are always exceptions, but broadly speaking, across what you might call the economic system, in those places where men have to work and live creatively in order to make a living, in the business world, in the scientific laboratories, in the courts of government, in the professions, in all those places where man is intellectually engaged and financially committed and centered in the concept of the need to have this finance, this profit, this gain, this salary, in order to live, that this entire system captures the basic dedication of practically everybody on Earth because we are involved in the pound sheet, the dollar system, whereby we must have this return in order to live.

And I’m not quarreling with the system. What I am quarreling with is this. No, I wasn’t even quarreled with it. But I… I’m pointing to it. What I mean is that here is an opportunity for the Christian of these days because broadly speaking across that scene, it is closed to the concept of God in my business as almost an edict across the whole face of the Earth. “Sure, that beautiful ideal of Christianity, yes, sure, it’s all right. It’s all right in church. It’s all right for the wife and the kids and so on. But don’t you bring religion into my business, eh?”

And it’s one of the most terrifying things on Earth and one of the least factors in human consciousness that has any common sense in it. Here is a great danger and yet a great opportunity because at least in these wonderful days, we don’t have to apologize for divine healing. We don’t have to say, “Well, we’re still speculating about it.” We don’t have to even argue the case that man can commune with God, that prayer is effective, that the power of God can come into a life and revolutionize it. These are proven things for anyone who cares to have a look at the situation. There are far too many case histories of this having happened.

Therefore, it is time that we woke up from our trance and the Christian particularly should see the significance of these events and see how this also potentially offers a total realistic scientific revolution to any businessman. To any employee in any business, to any scientist who is probing the secrets of the universe, because here is a new factor. That when the great power of God comes into a concern, it is prospered, it is harmonized, the relationships between management and staff are on a far better level, and the relationship between business and customer is multiplied because God is always multiplying everything that He is allowed to have any contact with. And I believe that the most serious challenge to every one of us in these days is to get right out of this periphery Christianity, which is just diddling around on the outside edges, and get it down there, where people have to work and live. And this, of course, involves you. It involves me. It involves everybody who is making a living. Because here is the opportunity to bear that light, that power, into the midst of these hard and difficult places where love is the most urgently needed ingredient, and where someday the businessman, the businesswoman, the employee, and everyone concerned with the creative aspects of living will just know from the cradle onwards that one thing you must never do in all these creative aspects of life is to isolate yourself from the genius of God, His ideas, His power, His peace, His harmonious manifestation.

This is the challenge because, thank God, you can prove it. This is the wonderful state we’re in. You can prove this now. But only again if we launch out into it. You can’t prove anything unless you become involved. And what is so centered in my heart and mind concerning this camp and all Camps Farthest Out, because you know the respect I have for it. I’ve always believed that Camps Farthest Out was one of the great forward sweeping movements because it was founded on a big vision. And if there ever was any danger it would only be that we let the vision drop. But I never have believed that Camps Farthest Out or any aspect of the Christian society in a collective way ever could have power until we were prepared to let the vision be filled in by our personal dedication, expendability out there in that world. One of the amazing things about a gathering like this is that you come from many areas, many churches, many places. You have an indwelt vision of integrity, of being integrated too, of being of one mind. You don’t care if you’re sitting next to a Methodist.

Now wait a minute now. Whoa. I wasn’t meaning that or how to stir anything. I was pointing to something beautiful. Now you got me mixed up. Oh, dear. Well, you just don’t care, do you? And that is a very good thing. Because if we’re all of one mind, it doesn’t matter what our labels are. If you’ve got love, you see the labels just go fluttering off on the gale of it. When you have love, you have everything. And if you, coming in from all your churches, and you and I and all of us have an absolute reverence for every church, every denomination, every creed, every religion, for that matter, then, yes, you’ve got a unity of purpose. And you, as that Christed individual filled with love, can go back into your church, into your office, into your factory, into your workshop, with a vision of being raised up by the Lord to be His light unto that scene, that those of lesser vision may not be judged to have lesser vision, but may be filled with that which is radiating through you with such a wide horizon of dedication and of love and unreserved praise for them and their lives, that you might prove in the midst of these factors of living that when you walk with God, the area of God extends around everybody else.

You might be the chosen one to have the next good idea about your business. And a divine idea is better than a human one, for He vests in you the power to fulfill it. You might have in you some great faculty, some talent, that perhaps you, in the immature years, pushed down, and said, “Well, of course, I’d love to do that, but I haven’t enough friends, enough money, enough of this or that.” It might be your opportunity to have another look at this thing you’d like to do more than anything else and say, “Well, Father, do You want me to do this? Will this bear a blessing to the world?”

And learn to be stretched and trust the Father to open the way for you. If it’s true for you, He knows how to do it. Go back into your communities. Not saying, “Well, we had a lovely time at camp. It was beautiful. I feel a lot better.” Don’t bother about yourself feeling better. Well, yes, but… But only with this vision of rubbing your hands here right. From now on, “I couldn’t care less about me. What, Lord, do You really want me to be doing? Show me how to do it.” And live one day at a time. I know the Lord is in the midst of it. And that you have been appointed His ambassador into the scene where you find yourself each day. And that your life is so committed to Him that you are prepared henceforth to accept the hand and the will of God in every experience that comes to you. So you might be moved into it to harmonize it, to bring new light to bear, to go through it, to find new victories, to be strengthened, lifted, to grow in order to accomplish the will of God for the greater works of tomorrow. And the day after that and all the days that God gives to you in this world and right on throughout all eternity.

And finally in this, if you could always remember in that ambassadorship that the eternal life we speak about is here and now. This is your eternal life. This one moment of consciousness for your life is always lived in the moment of awareness for the memory of the past and unknowingness about the future, but this one moment where your mind is focused is your life and will be the same a million years from now. Your life focusing on whatever is engaging your loving attention this present moment, this moment with God. And thank You, Father. Father, in this Thy holy presence our thoughts go out in love and compassion to our loved ones and friends, to Harry, the young man in the camp Hugh who needs all your love and all your help. Perhaps you can find him. Harry is his name. An old lady I went to see, ninety-odd years old, fell down, hurt her arm, upset, but yet still came to camp. What is her name? Tell me someone, the first name.

Inman. Mrs. Inman? All right, take Mrs. Inman into your prayers. For when you see the courage and faith and love of a lady in her 90s coming to camp despite the fall that would probably put most of us in bed for a week anyway, then reverence it. She’s here for a purpose. Let your love embrace her in prayer. And this Harry, I’m concerned about him. Compassionately concerned. All right, let’s draw him in to the center.

And love him. Pray with him and for him. And in the silence for a moment, breathe the names, the Christian names of anyone else for whom you wish to pray, in the knowledge that as we draw them in to the perfection of Christ, He is quickening their lives in ways that He knows much more about than we do. Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, here are the names of the people for whom we are in prayer.

And thank You, Father. We leave them in Your care. And know that wonderful things are in the making, and that Your will for the highest good of each one, as You know it, is now being done. Thank You for this camp. And all the other camps. And all their leaders. All their council rings. And all their people. Thank You for all the work that has gone to make possible our assembly here. May Thy tremendous blessings rest upon Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, upon Ethel Banks, upon Genevieve Parkhurst, and Tick and Margaret Watson, and all those of the council ring, and every one of us here. Lord, just take us all. Thank You for everything.

And bless you all.