WHOLE SPIRITUALITY

My dear ones, so many of you approach spirituality one piece at a time, as if life could be broken up into pieces. Thus, you work hard on your spiritual practices of prayer or meditation, while you fail miserably to love your close intimates and fellow man. Or, you work hard on becoming functional, but do not concentrate on developing a relationship with God. Or, you work hard on developing your relationship with God, but become completely dysfunctional.

My dear ones, none of this works. Let me show you something: These things -- spiritual practices and the relationship with God, practical functionality, and your love relationship with human beings -- are all related. Here is how:

If you do not love people well, you are betraying My children. You need to work on loving them very well, put a lot of energy and effort into learning to love them well. If you do not, you will not be at peace within yourself. You will feel disturbed, lonely, guilty. These things will cloud your mind, ruin your spiritual practices, and hurt your relationship with Me.

If you do not allow a relationship with Me in your life, in whatever form you know Me to be, then your relationships with people will suffer. For relationships to be truly good, higher consciousness is needed; spiritual harmony is needed; an open heart is so needed. Otherwise, you approach your relationships with false ideas, with a mind that is very unenlightened, with a heart that is confused and shut down; and your relationships suffer these things. To whatever degree your relationship with Me (whether you call me a personal God or not) is alive and healthy, your relationships are helped by that. Yes, this is so. This is why you need Me.

You see, if your heart is open, you DO have a relationship with Me AND with others. If you close your heart to Me, it is closed to all; and if your heart is closed to people, it is closed to Me.

Then: If you fail to be functional, you let people down. People feel they cannot rely on you. Your affinity with people is hurt when you are dysfunctional, because you are constantly letting them down, costing them dearly, and so forth. This shows a lack of consideration for people, and people feel that. Therefore, you cannot be dysfunctional and have your relationships be smooth and good.

Also, My dear ones, true functionality should be inspired by love. If you try to be functional and turn away from love, becoming a highly functional but closed-hearted person, your functionality becomes a deadly trap. It becomes a terrible thing. But when your functionality in life is INSPIRED by love, it is alive; and it is GOOD for the soul, to be a servant, to be functioning for love. Indeed!

Now: My dear ones, you cannot be dysfunctional and serve God very well. Indeed not. How can this be, My dear ones? How can you be dysfunctional and serve ANYBODY well? Most likely you will fail over and over again if you refuse to be functional while trying to be a servant of God. It cannot be. No, My dear ones, it cannot.

And also, as I said about functionality being inspired by love, if functionality is inspired by a relationship with Me as well, that completes its fulfillment. That adds fire and passion and wind and meaning to functionality that would not otherwise be there.

Therefore, fulfilling and good relationship with people depends on functionality, spiritual harmony, and the relationship with God.

And, the relationship with God depends on functionality (to be a good servant of God), and on good love of human beings (because you cannot love God while not loving human beings; it is not possible). Now, let Me add here, that this does not mean that My love for you is ever compromised by lack of any of these things. It just means that for a functional relationship between you and Me, this is needed.

Truly fulfilling functionality that is not soul-killing MUST be inspired by love and by the relationship with God. Functionality that exists simply for functionality, or for selfish desires, buries a human being.

Therefore, My dear ones, pay attention to all areas of life, and ignore none; because if you do it will be to your detriment.

People tend to get into ONE thing and one thing only, because at first it FEELS faster that way. If you focus all your energy on meditating, you seem to progress very fast. If you focus all your energy on functionality, you quickly master many functional things, etc.

However, this feeling is false. If a child were to decide that they would concentrate on only one subject for their school career so that they could pass with flying colors, then they would succeed in doing so IN THAT SUBJECT ONLY and fail all the others. The result would be, they would have to go back to school and learn the other ones.

My dear ones, do not make this mistake. Do not deal with life one subject, one area, at a time. If you do so, this is going to be a very long journey for you. It may seem faster at first to focus on one area, and ignore the rest in order to focus, but trust Me, you are setting yourself up for a long and difficult road that way. When you do that, you will create many problems that you will need to fix later. And you will fail to develop in many important ways that you will need to do later.

Embrace spirituality in the WHOLE of your lives, and you will be happy, and all will be happy. Indeed!