A Christmas Message: Your Purpose Is to Be Loved

By Laurel Elstrom

Editor’s note: the following message was received in meditation.

Do you not realize that your entire purpose is to be loved? Will you allow creation to love you? You think that you lack love, that love is something to be found, grown, or earned. Meanwhile, love pours forth to you in every eternal moment, overflowing beyond measure in every way through every one and every thing in your experience. If you will only look with open eyes, you will clearly see it.

Did you think your job was to be the giver of love? Ha! How can you give that which is never absent? Giving love would imply that love is sometimes not present, and that is simply not possible. Love is the Source of All that Is. Love eternally surrounds you, manifesting according to your will, in the face of every other-self you see and in every beat of your heart.

The heart of the One is constantly enveloping you with love, while you turn away and insist on feeling lonely or unworthy or unloved. Have you had enough of this illusion?

Do you not see that every atom of the chair you sit on is loving you, as it holds you, supports you, and comforts you? The air you breathe, the food and water you take in, the body that serves as your faithful companion for this Earth Game . . . all is here to serve you in unconditional love, with complete abandon and joy.

It has always been so and will always be. Since the day you entered the Earth Game as a babe, every perception has risen to serve you. The sun has risen for you. The wind has blown for you. The plants that have grown, the animals who have willingly given their lives for your sustenance, the oxygen, music, and beauty, all have appeared to offer you unfailing and never-ending love.

It is you who imagined this was not so, you who have written the story of your own hardships. You are a powerful God/Goddess who has the free will to experience whatever you choose. The other-selves you believe have harmed you? They have served you well by playing the roles you have asked of them. They have reflected back to you out of their unfailing and unconditional love for you. Look to see if it is not true.

The dish that holds your food, the car you drive, the pen you write with . . . on and on and on, in form and out of form. Every experience is one you have chosen. Every encounter, every other-self you have attracted or repelled, all is given with love and non-judgment, according to the vibration you have held. Even what you think of as your hardships are responses to your own bidding, reflecting back to you the places where you are still closed to receiving love.

Your task, my dear sweet child of love, is not to give love, but to receive the love and adoration that surrounds you and is you in every moment, on every level. For indeed, giving and receiving are one. And as you receive love, you give it.

When your receive love from your other-selves, you free them! When you receive love from the things of form that serve you, you free your own creations. Even your story can be freed, for when you love it, you free it to be what it is, a beautiful tale of liberation.

Indeed, when you receive the love that is your home, you free your Self, for there is but One, and you are it. All who love you implore you to give priority to this practice. Receive the love that awaits your acceptance, and in so doing, you set us all free!

Laurel Elstrom is a certified professional coach and a teacher of A Course of Love. She shares her reviews of ACOL chapters and offers additional support for students on her website, www.laurelelstrom.com. Among her current projects is a written work, “An Inquiry Companion to the Forty Days and Forty Nights of A Course of Love,” to be published in 2017. For more information, go to www.laurelelstrom.com or contact laurelelstrom@gmail.com.

 

Falling Leaves

By Michael Mark

I keep sensing this thing
called Love.

The leaves are whispering
something about it right now.
I imagine that when they all
make a sound together like this,
each vibrating in a crisp binding
they have built in this last season of the light–
one they never knew would lead to this–
they hear a sound so beautiful
they flood with joy and forget at last
to hold on.

This is how Love guides itself.
Holiness rises like a flood
to dissolve what only seemed to be.

The leaves drop to the earth.
They are already gone.

It was the sound of each other they heard,
ringing each in each–
the sound of never-ending,
the sound of what
was only ever
One.

Courtesy of Michael Mark, from his blog Embracing Forever.