2005-07-17-Gifts Are From The Goodness Of God

Session

Opening

MUSIC: "It Is Well With My Soul" (Men-O-Pah on vocals, with backup from Elena, on Piano) OPENING PRAYER: (Esmeralda)

TOMAS: Good afternoon, my beautiful friends and students, and co-teachers in the work of bringing about the Kingdom of God in the realms of humankind.

Lesson

There are so many gifts of giving that hail from the Almighty God! The gift of life is the beginning of an abundance of gifts given throughout your existence, not only on this earth plane, but in many worlds to come, as you ascend into the presence of the Father, from whence you came, including the gift of free will, which has become your birthright.

Having evolved as a species up from the life implantation way back before the age of fishes, and in the interim … between the implanting of life and today … the gifts you have been given are too many to count: your history, your growth, your governments, your mountains, your music, fine arts, philosophy, rainbows, rain and sunshine – all of these are gifts that have been made possible by the goodness of God.

In the short time we have together this afternoon, I would like to stress how much goodness you are surrounded by and how much goodness you each contribute to the march of ages, simply because you carry the seed of God within you. And to the extent that you co-operate harmoniously with the divine, as much as is humanly possible at the time, you are the deliverer of yet more goodness to those you meet.

Yet, there is some peculiar perception that goodness precludes truth and beauty.

There are many kinds of abstract beauty, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, just as truth is a matter of your individual comprehension; goodness is also an individual reflection of goodness as it is known and perceived by the individual.

The good grace of your company warms my heart. The good news of life’s adventures and challenges enriches your experiential depths. The goodness with which you look upon your dire circumstances as perhaps provident of the divine will and the goodness with which you perceive your fellows as children of God is, again, a reflection of God through your lives.

Jesus was admired for his goodness, and yet when it was brought to his attention, he said, "Why do you call me good?" for he was unaware of how his goodness reflected. He could ask, "Why do you call me good? Why do you say?" because he was not mindful to be good, he just was. He had no agenda. He had no sense of political correctness, even while he was well aware of the climate of the conditions of the world in which he lived, the times in which he lived.

Greeting one another with a holy kiss is good. Understanding goodness in your soul sets you aright with all that is – yourself and others. From this place of goodness in which you reside with Him and He with you, fear not the troubles of the day or the challenges therein. As the song said, "It is well with my soul." I wake with the goodness of God in the morning and sleep at night knowing I am in the hands of the goodness of God, and that makes it well with my soul.

Oftentimes the mind can be troubled, transition and change create insecurity, and growth sometimes requires conflict in the mind, but the soul itself, enshrouded and secure in God’s goodness, is at rest. Likewise, the body and its sundry parts can be undergoing changes to which your mind must make adjustments and your spirit compensate, but again, understanding the vehicle which has served you throughout this mortal incarnation, you can know how good it has been to use these parts and to live this life.

Like the vehicle that serves and which needs maintained for optimum service, but whose parts may need replaced or may need retired to the auto bone yard, the goodness of God is a part of all your comings and goings, in charge of all these mechanical parts and mental appurtenances. And so from the understanding of God’s goodness, you can know that they will be dealt with in the manner which all flesh is heir to, and that the mind which serves in this life will be replaced by higher mind when and as it evolves to such a state.

Ultimately, all goodness is God’s, and we grow in goodness as we become more God’s and less our own, less a product of our environment and more a product of divine guidance. It is well with my soul, knowing that all things serve for those who love the Lord.

It is so wonderful to feel your presence once again, all of you here in this solidarity of spirit. My heart overflows with the goodness I know as a result of this moment. It is a gift, indeed, that you give to me, and that I help provide to you, through the ultimate goodness of our Universal Father who gives and keeps on giving from the goodness of his heart. In contemplating the matters of your heart, are there questions or comments?

Dialogue

Elena: Tomas, you were talking about the goodness earlier, about being a good person, and truth and beauty, and that was kind of addressing some points, actually, about my new position. I’ve tried to be a good person in this last position, and I don’t know; some of it just hasn’t worked. But your comments about other people’s perceptions, too, that comes into it, so that helped on that. But if you have any other pointers for me as I go into this new position, I’d be really grateful to have them.

TOMAS: Only to say that the situation, as well as other workers, is to love what you do, and to the extent that you do not like what you do, you will not find happiness therein. And many times it is necessary to change what you do or modify the circumstances of your doing to find the right niche for yourself, wherein you can function fully, harmoniously, effectively, happily, and so on.

Some people find it right away. Some people spend their life looking. Some people just get bored more easily than others and require more variety in their life. And there are those who like to find something and stay with it for the security it provides, regardless of whether they are happy or not because their happiness is in the security. Or so they perceive. And so that is what we must deal with.

What you need to do when you find yourself in a position of not finding yourself fulfilled is find within yourself the reason you continue to stay unhappy or unfulfilled. Sometimes it is necessary to do that temporarily for pre-established purposes; thus you make a contract with yourself to do this which you don’t enjoy doing for a certain period of time in order to accomplish a certain goal.

There are other contracts you make with yourself and others that influence greatly how you relate to what you do. And so it comes back to: Know Yourself. You can not expect a polar bear to be happy at the equator. No matter how hard one species may want to be something they are not, it cannot be unless you are. Be as real as possible and follow that aspect of you that is your soul that will lead you into those fields that will be good for you and to you, for that is the arena wherein you will derive the most good and thus provide the most good for others as you pass by.

Elena: Thank you.

TOMAS: There is no failure in advancing or transferring or making changes. Just because you feel like it, is good enough. It is not necessary for you to rationalize and justify your actions because those who follow the divine, who seek for God in all they do, in every place and in every action, are not limited to understanding according to their own mind, but allow the divine mind to contribute to their walk, giving way to God to lead you into those pastures which may be greener and which may serve you better, at least for a time, until such time as you know what it is you love. And there you will stick with it until such time as the divine will nurtures you along to move to yet something better suited for that which you need to know next in your eternal career.

Elena: Thank you, Tomas. That helps a lot. I feel better now. I felt pretty good about the change anyway, but I appreciate your comments, too.

TOMAS: And naturally I appreciate your enjoying my input and sharing our rapport with friends and neighbors. It is often the case that as we work through our problems and others see how we do it, they will be able to learn from our example, and thereby save themselves much trouble experientially, trial and error being a good teacher but often brutal.

I hear the rain!

Group: Yes! Isn’t that amazing? Tell Father thank you for us. We sure do appreciate it.

TOMAS: Why don’t YOU tell him?

Group: Thank you! Thank you, Father. Thank you, God. Thank you.

TOMAS: Thank you, God, for the goodness of rain, for the life that comes with these abundant waters -- the cool and nourishing gift of life in a raindrop, as Your children are cool gifts of God in sonship.

Reneau: It’s interesting how works of nature fill our hearts and sustain us and make us feel better, just looking at green trees, and green lawns, and flowers and feeling rain and sun and shade gives a healing thing to our minds and our bodies. Thank you, God, so much for those.

TOMAS: Yes. That is your cradle.

Reneau: Nothing man-made can do that, for nothing man-made works as well as God-made.

TOMAS: But what man can contribute is the discipline and orderliness that maintenance and landscaping provide, to some extent at least, to hold back the floods and fires that without being constrained can be dangerous. Thus, humans are called upon to augment what God has provided.

Esmeralda: But he provided that ability in us to do that, too. He’s provided everything.

TOMAS: Indeed, he has. And yet how quickly, how often he is forgotten or overlooked in the task at hand. I don’t say that to inject shame or to chide you, but simply to state that at this point in your planetary evolution. It is only recently that God has been making such a comeback into consciousness that could be considered acceptable, socially acceptable.

Even so, there are politics of godly people that require some cultural sensitivity so as to not insult the spiritual sensibilities of your neighbors. The goodness of God encompasses all of these interpretations, and God will have more to say about the situation when all these factions are able to come to God in harmony and in peace and in appreciation of the differences in beliefs and opinions, and yet with a respect for the other’s perspective.

And so the culture is assimilated and we are one step closer to the family of man – the brotherhood of human beings. Goodness.

Goodness that comes from the heart is the kind of goodness that has a permanent and powerful affect on everyone and all that is, because it is so much like God. In spite of appearances to the contrary with hurricanes and tsunamis, forest fires and earthquakes, disease and death, error and accident, it is nevertheless true that God is good.

And you, too, who are his children, as you learn to be more like him, are more and more learning to recognize the value of goodness, how it is reflected, how it is assimilated, how it is utilized and how it is expressed. And thus we bring the goodness of God into the heart of our culture, into the mainstream of living experience.

Jesus went about doing good. Go about your lives, then, doing good because it pleases you. – not to brown nose or to manipulate, but to establish who you are in your association with others. I am a good man. I am a good woman. I have goodness within me. I am of God and God is good, even as He is also truth, and beauty. Are there any other questions?

Closing

All is well with your soul. I can feel it. I can feel the peace and harmony that reigns. I know there are questions that lie within you, but the music of my voice, the presence of our Master Teacher, and the comfort of the rain – not to mention the feast which you enjoyed together in remembrance of him – has given you a sense of contentment, and well being.

I urge you now to go forth, carrying this sense of well being into the world. And come back when possible to sit again in this place which we enjoy this moment, to once again draw strength and sustenance from that which is good, which is resident within you, that which is God’s, you.

See you again next time. Farewell.

Note

Tomas and I are committed to the task of bringing the light of truth to Urantia, as Ham set forth in his original public message to our world on February 1, 1991, in Los Angeles. We are co-creators with Father, for Michael, under Machiventa, and we are one in this ministry.

Tomas has not yet fused; he was (at last report) on the fifth mansion world.

Tomas volunteered to be part of the Teaching Mission and was chosen, in part, because of his mortal experience on another inhabited world in this local universe. He was married to Janus; they had four sons. As a cultural anthropologist, he went out into the lesser evolved areas of his world, studied the behaviors and pratices of the people and brought his findings back to his particular society which had, much like the neighboring planet spoken of in the UB, separated themselves from their backward neighbors.

I think I remember him saying his world had 2 suns and 3 moons or something extraordinary like that. At any rate, the weather on his world was very severe. For this reason, to protect themselves against the elements, his sector lived almost entirely in communities which were protected from the elements, which were evidently severe. The others, who lived outside the advanced culture, were quite barbaric and survival oriented.

In Tomas' home life, he credits their family prayers to their success as a family and in their individual ventures. It was part of their home culture to pray aloud together, as individuals, and discuss their issues and opportunities together in God's presence. They regarded the spirit as a very literal and viable part of their daily lives and consulted with It about everything, and openly.

His "speciality" seems to [be about] Character, since he has taught consistently about matters having to do with character. He is the source of the materials (edited by me and Angus during our courtship), which were gleaned from his many teachings on that topic in his sojourn with the Pittsburgh group, and made into a little book entitled "Fruits of the Spirit" which was published by Harp of God Foundation in 1999.

He is one of my best friends. I trust Tomas; I enjoy his presence. He does NOT indwell me in any way. He does not do my thinking for me. I am his comrade. He is my elder. Yes, I would miss him if I were not able to talk to him regularly as I do, but I would persevere in the task, even so. Just as I would (and do) miss any of my mortal friends who were no longer immediately active in my life, but still live the life and find pleasure and work herein.