Sacrifice is not something that you
can draw up through thinking and planning. It is not giving up something like,
“I want to go on a 28-day cleanse so I’m going to stop sugar and dairy.” That
is not a sacrifice; that is a cleanse.
Sacrifice happens when you are
called upon by Spirit to do something, and you have other plans, and you say, “Yes.”
That is sacrifice. But make no mistake; this is not a powerless place. Even
though it may not seem to be your choice, it is your choice to be willing and to surrender. In that choiceless
choice is the power, so when the sacrifice comes, we know that it was not
forced on us by outside circumstances or people; we said we would, and when we
were called upon, we did what we said we would do.
So many people feel powerless in
life. They feel they did not have a choice, but that a decision was made for
them. But that is part of the bargain, too. In life, part of your contract for
being here is that you be responsible. So if you abdicate that responsibility,
that is a choice that you are making and the decision will be made for you. You
have actually made it yourself, but victim
consciousness will say, “I didn’t choose this.”
If you trust love and
you remember in every moment that you made the decision to be here, to be a
Soul coming to this dimension, you will never be powerless. You will always be
able to unify with God, and you will always be able to know that you are
surrendering to God’s will. And because God’s will is your will, that is you
unifying with God and that is your power. Victim consciousness makes one feel
helpless, hopeless, and powerless, and it takes one out of the equation of
co-creating with the Creator and with the Creatress, Life.
Caring for my mother at
the end of her life was a responsibility. I felt the weight of that
responsibility, of course. But it was something I chose, and therefore, I felt
it forging me; I felt it changing me. I felt it working on me and giving me
everything.
Those who take
responsibility are fewer than those who do not. Those who do not take
responsibility may not know how powerful they are, and they may not know how
much their help is needed. They may not know how all the resources they need to
fulfill their help, will be there when they need it. They may not know that,
and some may not want that because they want to be responsible only to
themselves and to nothing else.
But at some point the
Soul calls us forward through our Soulful nature, which is love. Our Soul keeps
asking us to remember love, over and over and over again. We keep asking to
receive love, and we keep asking to give ourselves to love in many, many
different ways, shapes, and forms.
If we do not succeed, we
get to try over and over again until we begin to understand the nature of love.
And then, we see, “Oh, if I want understanding, I must be the one to understand.
I want love, so I must be the one to give love.” We see that we must embody and
be that which we want. Through sacrifice and commitment, you enter the great
Cycle of Grace and everything returns to you. It probably will not come to you
right in that moment, but in time it comes back to you tenfold. In the course
of long life, you begin to move and feel the Cycle of Grace and slowly begin to
understand why we make a sacrifice and why we choose to take on responsibility
on behalf of other people.
And if you ask, “Why
me—why do I always have to be the one who is responsible,” you should know that
right there is the blessing. It is just the opposite of the way it looks. The
one who has more responsibility is the one who gets blessed. Everybody is
blessed, no matter what they do or do not do. We are all equally blessed. But
when we agree to take on more, we are really receiving more. It may not be
apparent to us, but somewhere inside we are allowing ourselves to be forged by
giving more. Just by that act of giving more, we are being changed inside. We
may resist it, but something is absolutely happening that is a very, very good
thing for us.
When you let love in,
you let a lot in. We had four dogs, now we have three, and everyday my heart
cracks open with Buttercup and Bear because they are getting a little bit
older. People tell me, “I’m never having
an animal again. I can’t go through that.” But you know, that is life, and when
we love, implicit in that love is loss. It is built into it.
When Mary was here, some
friends asked us, “Shouldn’t she be in a home? It’s so hard on you guys—you’re
giving up your lives.” Just recently their adult daughter was stricken with a
devastating disease, and now they have left their home and their whole lives to
take care of her indefinitely. “As long as she needs us, we’re going to stick
by her.” So you see how much love there is and what love does?
We absolutely never know
how long something is going to last, how long we are going to be with someone,
or how long our life is going to look the way we want it to look. When the
universe moves through us in these ways, there are adjustments being made, and
sometimes those adjustments have to be made because we cannot make them
ourselves. Nonetheless, they need to be made, and those adjustments are good
adjustments.