Today's Quotation:

Let every creature have your love.  Love, with its fruits of
meekness, patience, and humility, is all that we can wish for
ourselves and our fellow creatures.  For this is to live in God,
united with him, both for time and eternity.  To desire to
communicate good to everyone, in the degree that we can and
to which each person is capable of receiving from us,
is a divine temper, for thus God stands unchangeably
disposed towards the whole creation.

William Law

Today's Meditation:

It's far too easy to keep ourselves separate from God, to see ourselves on one level of existence and God on another.  But things just aren't that way, and anyone who has learned of the true power of love will tell you that.  When we love truly and unconditionally, God is present.  When we aren't loving truly and unconditionally, God is waiting patiently for us to invite the love into our lives and live with a fullness that is inconceivable without it.

This isn't an attempt to convert; it's not a theological lesson or an attempt to get people to believe in and follow my own religious beliefs.  William doesn't tell us that to live in God we have to follow one particular faith or religion; rather, we have to love, and we have to experience meekness, patience and humility if we're going to reach our full potential as loving human beings.  Being in God is not being made rich and powerful and famous.  Living in God is being humble, caring, loving people who give our all to our fellow people.

Can we communicate good to other people in the way that God wants us to?  How can we do so?  For centuries people have been trying to find the answer to these questions, and it seems that the answer has been inside us all along.  If we wish to live in love, we need to spread goodness, because goodness is from and of God, and we become more God-like the more we spread the good things of life like our smiles, our caring, our kindness and compassion and encouragement.

These are the things God wants to give to us, and these are the things that he naturally wants us to give to each other.  After all, he did make us in his image, right?  What purpose would that serve if he didn't kind of want us to be just a bit like him?

Questions to ponder:

1.  Have you spread love today?  In what ways?

2.  Who spreads love to you?  Are they good role models for you?

3.  Is it possible to "communicate good to everyone"?
What would the world be like if everyone did this?

You must learn day by day, year by year to broaden your horizon.
The more things you love, the more you are interested in,
the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about--the more
you have left when anything happens.

Ethel Barrymore