The Big Berthas and the Beatitudes

The Big Berthas and the Beatitudes

by Bertha Jarrett

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Oh, God is so good. Loving Father, how gracious You are to have given us the gift of music, to have given us hearts that sing, and to have given us leaders like Charles and Daisy. I know Celeste’s name. I just love the way you teased her about that. It’s wonderful to be here with you again. And I do want to have a prayer with you before we start, because I have felt this day particularly that something very great is going on in this camp. I’ll tell you something that’s gone real deep within me. Starr Daily’s been with us today. Starr always told me when I would go to a camp that he’d pray for me. And wherever he is tonight, he’s praying for me and for us. Because his heart was so wrapped up in the camps. Some of you may not know who Starr was. Perhaps later on I’ll tell you a little bit about him. But those of you who do know him, love him very, very deeply as I do. And I’m sure that some of these great leaders in our camp, Glenn Clark and Frank Laubach and some of the greats, when we meet in a group like this, and the light shines so brightly. And people are loving one another.

I’m sure they’re here. Aren’t you? Don’t you feel that this is not just an earth thing? This is a heavenly thing that we’re doing. We’re part of the heavenlies. Let’s turn it all over to Him now. We come so lovingly, Father, and with such deep humility, knowing how great Thou art, how small without You we are, but growing to know more and more deeply every day that we’re very part of You.

And that greatness can be in us, too. So thank You that You’re very close here this night. Thank You, Lord Jesus, that You said, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age. Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst.” And we know You are with us.

And this makes us large. This enlarges our whole being. And gives us a new sense of the wonder of life. This great mystery that You have given to us, Your children. So thank You for what You’re going to reveal to us tonight. It may not be through my words, Father, although I offer myself to be Your mouthpiece. But Your Holy Spirit is at work amidst us and teaching us all. And so we thank You and thank You and thank You. Amen.

As I was thinking about Starr, I recalled what he said one time, that he had shared his same story over and over again of how he was a great criminal and was put into prison and the terrific experience he had there before he was finally lost in a coma and Jesus came to him. And he said, “You know what, Bertha? I’ve told that story so many times that every time I get up to talk, I think I’m not going to tell that again. That’s past. That’s all gone. I’m not going to tell it again.” And then he said, “I find myself telling it. Because there’s always someone in the group who hasn’t heard that, who doesn’t know what that has meant and what it can mean in the lives of every one of us to have that experience with Jesus.” And so I thought tonight, there’s so many of you here in this part of California that have heard my story, perhaps heard it more than once, but there’s something pulling within me that says there’s someone here that needs to know a few of these things that I went through and coming through those things in the consciousness that I was not alone, that there was someone greater, someone absolutely loving who was seeing me through.

I’m just going to give you very briefly the experience that I’ve had. Having been a Christian, a church-going Christian for all my life, I was raised in a Christian family, going to church every Sunday, singing in the choir. That’s why I love your singing so much. I used to sing in the choir for so many years. All the rest of that. But to me at that time, God was way off up there, in some far off heaven. And I was here on earth. And if I was a good girl, why, perhaps I would go to be with my Lord Jesus after this life was over with. And it took something that was very drastic in my life to make the change. Very suddenly, one night without any warning at all, my very beloved husband, my sweetheart and my pal for 30 years, was suddenly gone with a heart attack. Just like that. It left me so alone, so lost, so bewildered. Oh, I believed in life after death. I knew he was not really dead, but he wasn’t with me. And it was very, very hard. I went through agony. And I think I’ve told you since you’ve been here of that time when He came into me and filled me with His love.

And then He opened to me, my blessed Lord Jesus, what He’d been teaching on me all through the years. And I hadn’t taken in as part of living. Oh, I believed in the Bible. If anybody’d ask me, of course I believe. But Jesus gave us a whole pattern for living. He gave us an outline of life as it can be right here, right now. Not waiting for some far off heaven. I was left with no way to support myself. I’d been a housewife for 30 years. My husband and I had been through the depression. You remember those depression years? We’d lost everything we had. We’d managed to build back up again enough just to get our two children through school. They were both married and had left home. And I was alone with no means for making a living. Only a small insurance policy left to carry me over. And I began to open my heart to the Lord and ask Him, “What shall I do?” And He gave me His Sermon on the Mount. And in that Sermon on the Mount I read, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and everything else you need will be added unto you.” I don’t think I ever really believed that before. But I said, “All right, Lord, if that’s true, how do I go about seeking the kingdom of heaven?”

Well, I didn’t know then the real answer which has been growing more and more and more wonderful for me through these years as I’ve learned how to be still with Him. How to really commune with my Father in the stillness and listen to Him. But then I said, “Lord, show me how.” And the first thing that He did was to give me the Beatitudes. You know what the first Beatitude says? “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Just that plain. All right, Lord, what did that mean? That meant I had to open myself to be taught. I who had known nothing really about the reality of all this thing that Jesus was teaching. Oh, He was my wonderful Lord. I’d loved Him ever since I was a tiny child. But I hadn’t really known that what He was saying to His disciples back there 2,000 years was absolutely pertinent to me right now and I could take it into my life and use it. And so, I learned that in that Beatitude He was saying to me, “Listen, open up your heart and be taught of the Spirit.”

And so, I began to seek. This was the beginning of my quest. And I read every book I could get a hold of. I went out, came out here to California. I was living in Denver at the time. I came out here to visit my sister and she gave me Emmet Fox’s book, The Sermon on the Mount. That was the beginning of a whole new world for me. A world that said to me, Jesus is here right now. He’s teaching these things to us on this level where I began to understand that. She gave me that book at night. I took it to bed with me and I read it all night long. And I was thrilled within my very being. Here was an open door to a life I hadn’t really known anything about. And so, from there on, as I began to understand that Jesus was ready now to teach me, I was ready to learn. Well, I came back from California and there were the cards of condolence that I had from so many friends were lists of books that were sent to me by the different groups of people who evidently saw my name in the obituary and were sending me things they thought would be comforting to me. Lists of books from Unity, from Christian Science, from the Rosicrucians, from many different groups.

Well, I haunted the libraries. I got everything I could find. I couldn’t sleep at night unless I could read myself to sleep. And I finally found Glenn Clark’s books. And as I would read them, the tears would stream down my face and I’d say, “Oh yes, this is it.” And then I began to realize that when I had read that book and tried to think the next day what it was that I had read that was so thrilling, I couldn’t remember anything. My mind was numb. But you know a wonderful thing? All those things that I was reading and that my emotional nature was taking a hold of and saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” were down in there in that subconscious of mine. And when the time came, and this was quite some time later, that I was asked to go out to do this speaking, I find myself speaking out these truths that I learned then. And so, you see, we are very complicated beings.

There are many different parts to us, many different things, ways in which God can use us. Well, I asked Him how I was to make a living. And He told me, “Seek ye the kingdom of heaven and what you need will be added unto you.” And I said, “All right, Lord, I just want to turn my life over to You completely.” And you know, if we could really do that, right from the very beginning, our path would be very much easier. I did it with my mind. I did it the best I knew how with my heart. I was ready to do it. I was seeking. But I still wasn’t there, even though He had told me He was with me. Well, He began to use me. I had to find some work to do. One day, I happened to be walking down the streets of Denver and the president of the Kiwanis Club came by. And my husband had been a Kiwanian and I knew him very well. And he came up to me and we talked a little bit. And he turned to go away and then he came back and took hold of my arm and he said, “Bertha, what are you doing now?” And I told him I needed to find something to do.

And he said, “It just suddenly came to me how wonderful it would be if you would come and work with us in our office. Our secretary that had for many years is retiring and we need to find someone.” And I said, “But Clarence, I’m not a secretary. I’ve never had any secretarial training.” He said, “Can you type?” Yeah. My one little talent. I said, “Yes, I can type.” So they took me into that office and the wonderful woman that had been working with them for so long trained me in that work. I learned some marvelous lessons there. I’ve always, Rod was telling us how shy he was. I don’t think he could hold a candle to the inferiority feeling that I carried with me. I built that into me when I was going to, through the eighth grade actually and I began to grow so tall that all the boys and girls were shorter than I was and I suffered a great deal with it, especially since that was during the first war day or first world war days. Do you remember what they called the big German guns?

The big Berthas. Well, this big Berthas suffered a great deal to that time and it did build within me. This thing of trying to shrink down and get out of sight of people and building in that feeling of inadequacy and so forth that we do these awful things to ourselves. But there in that Kiwanis club I had to meet with 150 men every week. I had to hand out their attendance slips. I had to get up and make announcements to them. And it was a tremendous thing to me that as I would open my heart and say, “Father, I can’t do this. Come in,” I would find myself doing it. Well, this went on and I was still praying for the chance to do something that I felt was more in God’s work. We know I’ve learned since that we can be in God’s work in whatever we’re doing wherever we are. But then I wanted to get into something where I felt the Spirit was flowing. So I was taken to my first CFO camp by some friends there in Denver up into the Montana camp. And there I had some really wonderful experiences. It seemed to me that I, a little new baby in the kingdom, was being fed because prayer after prayer I could hardly want for anything, well, the answer came just like that.

One night, for instance, I went out. I was still crying and in misery over what had happened to me. And there was a heavy storm. Have any of you been up on that Flathead Lake there in Montana? Storm came sweeping in across the lake. The rain was pouring down. The waves were rushing up. And I put on a raincoat and a hood and went out in that storm just to get rid of the turmoil that was inside of myself. And I wandered over through a rock pile and I finally sat down and I had glasses on and of course they got splattered so I took them off and laid them down on my lap. When I went back into the cabin I discovered I didn’t have my glasses. Well, I said, “Lord, You know I’ve got to have these glasses.” Just the simple simplicity of a child. I walked out, wandered in among those rocks that had no idea where I’d been before. Walked right straight over and picked up those glasses. Prayer after prayer came so, the answer came so quick and so fast that I knew. And you see what He was doing with me? He was feeding me baby food. And we can go for a while with that and then we come to something that takes a little bit more strength.

And He leads us up a little bit higher and it just seems as though prayer stops being answered. We seem to get to the place where it doesn’t work at all anymore. And perhaps we get a little bewildered and wonder what we’ve done wrong and begin to ask questions about it. And so, He gives us another experience. An experience of depth. At that camp, I learned about Koinonia Foundation, this organization that had been started by the great leaders of our camp back in the area of Baltimore where they established a training center preparing people spiritually, technically skilled people who were ready to go overseas, preparing them spiritually to go out as brothers of men, to go out with love in their hearts, to go out with confidence in their hearts that God was with them in this job which could be so frustrating and so difficult. And Glenn Harding, the director, came to Denver and these friends of mine from CFO invited me to meet him. And I went there and he told us the beautiful thing that Koinonia was doing and my heart just leapt within me. Oh, this sounded so wonderful but I didn’t have any of the skills he was asking for. There wasn’t any reason I should go there. And yet, the next day, he called me up.

My friend said as I was leaving that night, “I’ve been talking to Glenn about you.” He called me up and wanted to know if he could come down to the office and talk with me. They had a little library there and we went in there and sat down to talk and he prayed with me. Told me a little more about Koinonia and then just out of the blue he said, “Bertha, we’re needing secretaries at Koinonia. I think God wants you there. How soon can you come?” Just like that. I was there in two weeks and I was there for 18 years. In that wonderful work back there where we learned of prayer, where life was fulfilling, where not only did we learn of prayer and learn the beautiful things, we bumped up against people of all kinds and all types and all countries, in fact, of all different types of religion, of all ages, a whole conglomerate group of people. They’re living together in a family. We called ourselves the Koinonia family. If you can think of any better way to get spiritual training than to living in a group like that, I don’t know what it is. Things can get pretty tough sometimes. I can remember going into Glenn’s office one day when it seemed as though everything had been going wrong and we were talking about it and all of a sudden I heard myself say to him, “But Glenn, this is wonderful.

This is our training. We’ve got to learn to meet these things.” And then he picked it up, and I think he had it before I ever did, picked it up and said, “Yes, it is in meeting people daily. The little daily contacts that we make. This is a way that we learn to grow in love.” And so, after those years there at Koinonia, it was a very easy thing for us to pick up our prayer life as we retired and came out here to California. And from here on it’s been a time of at first wondering why, Lord, we were led there. I don’t doubt that for a minute. Dorothy and I, you’ve met my Dorothy over here. She and I came together from Baltimore because we had been to a conference, a CFO conference down at Goleta and I had told people there that I was thinking of retiring from Koinonia and that I was interested in mobile home living. And a woman came up to me and handed me a little card and said, “Before you decide where you’re going to put your home, look at this place.” Well, when we came out this way and we drove across the country first with Dorothy in her car and decided that we’d go south and see this little place where we’re living and then go on up north.

I have a sister in Santa Barbara and a son in Santa Monica. We drove into that place and the minute we got there we knew this is where we belonged. In fact, we went in it by accident. The map said that there was a little road that turned to the right to go to Fallbrook and we thought we were going to Fallbrook. We turned the first little road that we came to and we turned right into the Oak Crest Mobile Home Estates. Fallbrook was miles down the road and off in another direction. We aren’t living in Fallbrook. That’s just our post office. And so there we were and before we left the next morning to go on up the coast to visit the family that I’d come out to see, Dorothy had bought her coach there and we reserved the next little lot for my coach. This is the way it’s happened. Now the thing that I’m telling you and the thing that has been happening to me since then, and of course I have gone way back into ancient history with you tonight because this you have to sort of build up a foundation. What I’m saying to you is that as I put myself into God’s keeping, one thing right after another has led me along, given me the answers that I needed to where I am at the moment, and I know that as He does this, He doesn’t stop.

It goes on and on and we grow and we grow and we understand a little bit more about this great mystery of life. Life is a mystery. Oh, I had so many questions when I first became aware or awakened in the kingdom living. What’s it all about, Father? Why are we here? We’re born, we live a few years, we die. What’s it all about? And the answers begin to come. We’re God’s children. We’re very part of this great creation of His. We’re not any one of us here by accident. We are chosen ones. Oh, how many times I’ve quoted that wonderful passage from Ephesians, the first chapter of Ephesians, as it’s written in the Phillips translation. “Before the foundation of the world, I chose you to become in Christ My holy and blameless children living under My constant care.” I got that passage down into my heart. It thrilled me. It gave me a whole new concept of what this is all about. We are beloved ones. We are chosen ones. Every one of us. Now, I know there are many of us here tonight, even after having been here in this camp with the joy that we’ve had and the spirit of light and love that has been flowing. I know there are still those of you who are carrying burdens in your hearts.

I know there are still those of you who have come hoping for physical healing and perhaps nothing has happened to you yet. But my dear ones, I want you to know this. And I know this. I can’t make you know it. This only comes to us from within us. I know that having turned to Christ, having given yourselves to Him, putting yourselves into His hand, nothing can happen to you that is not for your highest good.

Nothing. It may not seem like good to you right now, but all things work together for good to those who love the Lord. That’s a promise that’s in our Bible. And so if you can only look upon this thing that’s happening in your life as a part of the process through which a loving Father is allowing you to experience and know that out of it is going to come something great and good for your life, it changes things. It puts a whole new light on what I’m suffering. And I told you the other day when I was talking to you that I have learned what it means to be in great pain. I have learned what it means to go month after month not quite knowing where I was going to be and how I was going to live and all the rest of this thing that happens to people. But He’s led me so gently and so wonderfully and so lovingly along the way, all the way, that when we break a hip or we break an arm, we can turn to Him and say, “All right, Father, what is it time to learn from this?” And the doctors say, “It’s going to take you a long, long period of time and perhaps you never will be quite right when you are at your age and have broken a hip.”

The doctor I had when I broke my hip was just a very young man. And he looked at me when I asked him how long this would take and he said, “Well, you know, my dear,” he said, “you’re no longer 16 years old.” And he says, “It takes longer for those bones to heal.” He said, “Don’t rush it.” And I said, “How long will I be here?” Some of you have heard me tell this, you just shut your ears because there’s somebody here that needs this tonight. I don’t know who it is. He said, “You’re going to, it may take seven or eight weeks, but don’t rush it. Don’t hurry with it.” This was the surgeon that had come down from another little town. This happened to me at this conference up in Wisconsin, a CFO conference, where I fell in the dining room and broke my hip and they took me to the little hospital in the little town of Ripon where they had no surgeon. Surgeon came down from another town 35 miles north on Mondays. Well, this happened to me on Saturday, so I lay in that hospital bed over there until Monday waiting for the doctor to come. And so this young man came and he was dear. He explained the whole operation, what he was going to do with me and all about it.

And then he was the one that told me it would take me seven or eight weeks before I would want to get out of that hospital. Well, the next morning after the operation was all over, he was gone again, and the house doctor came in. And I asked him how much damage would it do if I would move around a bit. He said, “Well, I don’t think it will do any damage, just don’t tear the stitches out.” And I said, “Well, could I get up in a wheelchair?” And he said, “Yes, you won’t want to, it’s going to be very painful for a while.” I said, “Well, I’d like to try it.” So they brought me a wheelchair. Blessed Dorothy over here stayed with me all during that time. And another couple of days, I said, “How soon can I learn to use some crutches?” And the nurses were utterly appalled. I shouldn’t put my weight on that foot. Doctor said, “It won’t hurt a bit if she’s willing to take it.” So they brought me crutches and I began practice walking up and down the hall. When the doctor came back in the two weeks later to take the stitches out, I met him walking down the hall.

He took me back to my bed and put me in to take out the stitches and he looked at me and he said, “Mrs. Jarrett, you have made a remarkable recovery.” You see, I’d had a whole international prayer group praying for me.

And I said, “Well, then, doctor, what does that mean? How soon can I go home?” He said, “Would you give me two more days?” And so, in two days, and sixteen days after I had that operation, I was able to walk unassisted up the steps of an airplane and I was flown back home to Baltimore. Now, this is the way God can do when we believe that He is taking care of us, when we believe that His plan for us is good, and we go ahead and act as if we believed that. And so, there was pain. I had pain in that hip for some period of time. It’s all gone now. I don’t feel as if I’d ever had anything the matter with it. The healing comes as we believe, and I love what Rod says, it’s a process. It may not come immediately, it may take a longer time. The next thing that I had that took the long time was when I tore these ribs of mine, and I got what the doctors called an intercostal sprain, and that’s something I don’t wish on anyone. That was more painful than anything I’ve ever gone through. And the doctor then told me, he said, “That pain’s never going to really go away.” Well, it’s gone away.

We don’t have to take the doctor’s words for things, my dear ones. They don’t know it all. They’re wonderful. We go to them when we need them, but we know within our hearts that God is the one that does the healing. And the more we can open our hearts to Him and believe and rejoice in Him. You know, joy is a wonderful healer. Have you learned that? Have you learned how great the power of joy is in the healing process? The Bible says, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” I love that little phrase because that’s true. The experience I had in that hospital taught me that about joy too because as I lay there one night, and that was before I’d had the operation and they hadn’t done very much to ease the pain which was there, and I asked the Lord what I was to do about all of this. And He always gives me some word from His words in the Bible. And the word came to me, “If ye abide in Me and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done.” And I found myself saying, “Lord, what is Your word? What is the word that I’m to take right now?” “The joy of the Lord is your strength” came into my mind, just as clearly as that.

The joy of the Lord is your strength. All right, so I practice breathing in joy. Did you ever do that? Just breathe in joy, feel this wonderful sense of the joyousness. You know, scientists tell us that our nervous systems respond just as powerfully to an imaginary thing. If we can imagine it emotionally enough, our whole system responds to it just as much as if we were actually experiencing something that brought this tremendous joy. And so, I felt joy. And that joy, I’m sure, was part of the healing power that I had. And so, we find in all of His teachings, all of the teachings of Jesus, we find that He gives us a way. He said, “I am the way.”

And it’s only been within this last year, maybe a year, maybe a little more than this last year, but this last year, in January, I had my right eye operated on for cataract. This eye wasn’t seeing very clearly, and this one had to be bandaged, so there wasn’t very much that I could do in the way of reading. I was required not to do any stooping. He said, “Don’t get your head below your heart level.” Well, you can’t do very much around the place without doing that. “Don’t have any strain, don’t work, I don’t want you to do any cooking,” and Dorothy hates to cook. So, here I was with plenty of time for meditation.

And that’s wonderful. And so, He began to teach me as I listened, and things came through in very wonderful ways. Jesus said to us, “I am the way.” Do you remember that God told Moses that His name was I Am? He said, “Don’t tell, go back and tell the people My name, the name of the One who sends you is I Am. I Am that I Am.” Do you realize how many times a day we use that name of God? Do you realize that I am that? There’s a psalm that we have in the 46th psalm that says, “Be still and know I am God.” I couldn’t say that for me. I could say to people, the voice within me is saying I am God. And I believe that. But you know, I changed that. I changed the word God to love. God is love. And I found I could say I am love. Because that’s my soul’s sincere desire to become love. One with my Father. And as we say I am these things, we are helping the inner light bring about in our experience that which we are claiming through the I am. Well, as I learned this and began to realize it, many times I had said I am sick, I am tired, I’m sick of this, I am that, I am the other thing, that I was simply destroying myself in an almost blasphemous way.

Oh, we do these things ignorantly, my dear ones, but God loves us and He sees us through them and He brings us to the place where we now know that we have this power in our own lives, this power to control our thinking. Oh, I had to learn that when my blessed husband died because the grief was so, so terrible and I was given to understand that Jesus had come not to bring me grief, He had come to bring me joy and that I could take that joy or I could hang on to the grief and the pain and He had given me a wonderful gift, the power to choose what I would think.

Many of you have heard me tell a little story that I kind of laugh at now. It seemed very silly and childish of how when I decided that I wanted the joy and not the agony, tears would begin to stream and that wave of agony would wash over me and I’d make myself get up and go and stand in front of a mirror and smile and say, “I am filled with the joy of the Lord. I am, I am, I am filled with the joy of the Lord. Well, I am filled with the joy of the Lord.” You see, we claim these things. They are God’s gifts to us. The fruits of the Spirit, the joy, the love, the peace. And so, as we understand this and begin to put it into action consciously, that’s why that little prayer I told you about means so much. Because if we have deep down in our hearts the fact that we’re not going to criticize, we’re not going to condemn. Let only thoughts that bless dwell in my mind. And when a thought that is not a blessing thought comes into my mind now, there’s sort of a little click. Oh, you’re getting off the base now. Come back, come back. Silence my tongue to aught that is unkind.

Doesn’t matter what the situation is, how deeply wrong a person may be in the sight of everyone else. In the sight of God, that person is perfect and beloved. And if I’m going to be one with Him, if I’m going to be one with my Jesus, Jesus who came, He said, not to heal those who were already well, but He’d come to save those who were needy and who needed Him. If I’m going to be a part of that, I’ve got to live up to it within myself. And this takes a lifetime of practice because over and over and over again we have to remind ourselves. That’s why Dorothy and I use that little prayer every single morning. And we have for a couple of years. You see, what we’re doing is educating down into the very subconscious part of us the fact that we are not to criticize, we are not to condemn, we’re not to send out thoughts that hurt. Oh, you run up against things where you just long to change them. Where you see a situation maybe in someone in your own family. And I would just write all the things that that person needed to do to be the right kind of a person they ought to be. And then I’d realize what I’d done and tear the letter up and throw it away.

We cannot change people, my dear ones. Not you and I. Not this with our outer emotions. Jesus changes people. The Christ within me does the changing. If I can control my own thinking and let Him have a clear, pure channel, I can be the light of the world, as He promised us. It doesn’t come easily because for so long, we’ve thought we had to do it all. We’re coming through into a whole new kind of a concept of life. We’re coming through to the place where we know that His way is the only way. He said, “I am the way. I am the door. I am the life. I am the light. I am.”

And as I know this, great things can happen. Now this can happen only if we have really come to the place where we’re dedicated enough to discipline ourselves a little bit. And I’m really not a very disciplined person. I have to be perfectly honest with you. All this that I’m saying to you sounds as if I were just this wonderful person who was doing all this. I’m aspiring to all of this, my dear ones. I’ve come to know from within me, and I can’t make you know this, I can only tell you and share with you that I know from within me that this is the way I must go. Now if it rings any bell with you, if it sounds good to you, pick it up. If it doesn’t, as I said the other night, just let it fall away and don’t let it worry you. Find your way, but find that way of the Christ, that way of perfect love. If we do that, we can’t go wrong. We simply can’t go wrong if we are in the flow of the love of Christ, because His way for us is perfect. And so, when we meet up with life’s problems, we find we can’t solve ourselves. We turn to Him and say, “Lord, I of myself can do nothing.

I know You have the perfect answer for this one, this dear one of mine.” And I’ve had right in my own little family tremendous problems to face. And I’ve seen how prayer works. Prayer worked in the life of my daughter when she was going through a terrific time, a divorce with the children in the family. And I was agonizing to the place where I would walk the streets there at Koinonia at night, not being able to get through to peace because I was so longing for her to find the way. Until one night I was stopped right in my tracks and the voice within me said, “Let go. Release her. She’s My beloved child. I love her far more than you love her. Let go and let Me have her.” And I was finally able to do that. And oh, the tremendous load that comes off of our shoulders when we know that no longer do we have to carry the burdens of the world. The government is upon His shoulders, not ours. We do our part as He teaches us. We love, we serve wherever we can. We do the best we know how in this outer, but we do not carry the responsibility of it. I think that’s what delays the progress of maybe some of our ministers who work too hard because they carry the load of responsibility on their shoulders.

“The government is upon My shoulders,” says our God. And so we do our very best. People used to say to me it sounds as though you say we should just fiddle our fingers and God would do it all. That isn’t what I’m saying at all. I’m saying we give life all that we have of the best that there is in us. And then we let go. The fulfillment of what we’re doing, the answer is God’s. That’s His business. My business is to obey. I learned that in a very drastic way over in India many years ago when Dorothy and I had a trip for Koinonia around the world. And we saw in many, many instances the dreadful poverty, the awful conditions under which people were living. I remember we flew into Calcutta one time and came in from the airport into the city, and all along the sides of the road were lined up people, many of them mostly naked, having absolutely nothing, lying there and sitting there in abject misery, little children with their pipe stem legs and their big bellies there just starving, mangy cows wandering in and out among them, flies all over everything. And when we got to the place that we were staying, there was a woman there who had come to write, she was going to write a book on comparative religions and she had arranged for a young man to take her into the old Kali temple there in Calcutta and she invited us to go with her and we went and the sights that we saw there simply broke my heart.

I couldn’t stand it. I went back home. I couldn’t sleep. I lay there on my bed trying to pray and I couldn’t pray because my heart was so agonizing. You know, when we’re in that, we’re separating ourselves because God’s way for us is peace. And it took me quite a while to get to the place where I could get quiet enough to listen to my Father. And into my heart came the realization just as clearly as if the words had been spoken to me. “These too are My beloved ones. In My own time, in My own way, they too will come into the light. The burden is too big for you. You cannot carry it. The government is upon My shoulder. Your part is to do whatever you can to help and then let go.” Because as we agonize, as we fear, as we fill our hearts with negativity, God cannot get through. God is all perfection. He’s all love. And His plan for all of His children, all over this world, is perfect. Now, we’re just here in a little school of life. You and I have perhaps come a longer way. We’ve come to understand a little bit more of what life is all about. He doesn’t love us any more than He loves those who haven’t found Him.

He is the body of us when we know this. But He is still the shepherd, the loving Shepherd of all those others and is leading His sheep in His own time and in His own way. Well, when I began to understand that, it made a great difference in my whole feeling about all of life. No angry God. No God that picks out this one and that one and favors them.

No God who punishes people because of something that they’ve done. That’s what they think over there in some of those countries that they’ve committed sin in some other life and so they’re being punished. God can’t be a punishing God if He’s love. If God is love, He’s all love. He’s love for everyone. You don’t divide love up and say love is hate and love is this or that. Love is. God is.

And so as we sit here in this room tonight, we who have come, some seeking because we have great problems, some who’ve come because they want to help others, we don’t know what’s in the hearts of people until we get much closer than we’re able to in just a few days. But I want to leave this message with you.

Cannot get away from the love of God. You can shut it out of your life by refusing to believe in it, but it’s still there, warm and tender and loving, waiting for you to come back. And the minute you turn back, He receives us. He always forgives.

He always accepts us. There’s nothing we can do to separate us from the love of God, not height nor depth nor what all the rest of that is that the psalm says, nothing can separate us from God’s love. And you know, when you really know that, you can face the little things that life hands out to you with so much more acceptance, with so much more awareness of this life as a loving process, of a God who brought us into being because He is manifesting Himself in us. He’s finding His joy in us.

We are beloved ones. Being given a chance to discover that for ourselves and then not to necessarily through actions or words but through consciousness, through the things we are thinking, we’re able to send it out to others. We may not ever know the blessings that have gone out.

I’ve had many times the experience of being awakened in the night, for instance, and knowing that I was to pray, not knowing for whom. Sometimes, maybe later on, a letter would come and say, “You must have been praying for me on that night because this wonderful thing happened.” And so God takes our prayers. He takes what we have to offer as we offer it in love and uses it to His glory for the redemption of His world.

God is so good. God is so good. And He loves us so much that we need to have no fear of anything that this little piece of life can do to us. This little parenthesis in eternity, I guess it’s Joel Goldsmith that called that. Little parenthesis in all of eternity.

And the more we learn in this area the more we know who we are, and that’s been man’s quest through the ages. “Man, know thyself.” I remember Robert Frost in one of his poems said the trouble with man is that he doesn’t know where he’s going and he can’t know where he’s going because he doesn’t know who he is. And who he is is too wonderful to believe.

We are very wonderful beloved ones of our Father God. Let’s pray. Father, if there are sore hearts here, if there are pains of mind or body, help us all to know that You are the answer. That You may function in many different ways. Through the prayers of friends, perhaps through the laying on of hands, perhaps through wonderful doctors, perhaps You even have other ways for us. But as we keep our hearts open wide to You, we know that Your love is fulfilling itself in and through us. And we are being made new creatures in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Thank You, Lord Jesus, for being here with us. Thank You, Father. Amen.