How To Help Someone Help Themselves - Page 2

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May 22, 2001

We can help wrap an injured bird's broken wing, but we cannot heal it. That is between the bird and God. We can even help unwrap their broken wing and urge them to the edge of the precipice, but we cannot make them take wing and fly. That again is between the bird and God. There is a delicate balance between helping others and hindering their spiritual growth by trying to live their lives for them, or "fix" them, and nowhere does this become more evident than in trying to help another person heal a negative life situation. Although we can realize the truth about someone and their situation, that it is perfect and whole and prospering with good, we still cannot MAKE someone heal or change or grow until they are ready, willing and able to do so. Jesus himself said that knowing the Truth would set us free. He did not say that someone else could know it for us.

When the person we are trying to help is aligned with Truth, the work is done easily and effortlessly. When they are not aligned with Truth, helping them becomes much more of an effort because of their resistance, whether it be conscious or subconscious. This is the point where we must gently assist them in getting to the root of the problem, which is the person's inability to see their own Divinity and let it flow through them and manifest in their outer life. I myself have experienced this in the form of friends trying to help me or Practitioners treating for me, and when I was not aligned with Spirit, I could feel an automatic block rising within me. Sometimes even knowing we are blocked intellectually is not enough to remove it, as proven by the failure of psychology and psychiatry to heal the wounds of the spirit. We must do the work on a deeper level, alone and within with only God to guide us, and "help ourselves" back to a state of grace, faith and belief. As Ernest Holmes states in The Science of Mind , "We can hire others to work for us, to care for our physical needs, but no one can live for us. This we must do for ourselves."

Imagine trying to experience the presence of God for another person. You simply cannot do it. You can try to verbally describe what it feels like, even act out the flow of Divine Love expressing in and through you, but it will all be lost on the other person if they have never experienced the presence themselves. Holmes goes on to tell us, "The Father's House is always open, the latch string ever hanging out, the door always ajar, but man must enter, if he wishes to abide within." Just as you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink, you can guide a person closer to the Source, but you cannot make them "see" it. To do so would be tantamount to mind control, or the cultlike enforcement rampant in organized religion, where few followers have ever actually experienced God, but all are called to worship Him according to doctrine set down by other humans, few of whom have ever experienced the Presence either!

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