Good morning.

It was very significant last night, W [wife], that on the 4th of July, America's Independence Day, you could put your braces on and stand with your walker and, with your husband and children helping, walk for the first time in so many years. You'll notice that life has moments almost like a movie; if you could draw back and see that scene as I saw it, you might have had tears in your eyes. Everything comes together for an almost poetic moment.

Your journey has been very long to this time, and your injury, as I told you several years ago, is one that is very much like My own. The fact that you have lost the feeling in your lower legs and feet, the place where you connect to the earth, is very much like My situation. Because where I connect with this earth is through My children. I could walk on the earth as My children come forth fully and consciously as children who know Me, who know one another and the creation around them, and, therefore, My feeling is not only in My heart or My mind but is absolutely joined together with My children and My creation. It becomes a reality that's fully expressed and that's what you call the Kingdom.

So, to see you last night, still with only a little bit of sense in your lower legs, but standing and walking with the help of those braces, it is a symbol, in a way, of our progress, My own progress with My children in making the Kingdom. And you notice how proud your sons were of you last night. Why? Because, whether they express it or not, they have been on this journey with you, also. So, to see a defining moment like that and to experience it with you and help you with your support as you take those steps was very meaningful for them. I think, too, that with your family progress, the progress of your communication together, this moment is very special, very poignant. You can see that your walking is not only a symbol of coming closer to the Kingdom and that time when we can truly have a full communication, but it's also a symbol within your own family of moving forward now as you have begun to find a new level of communication with your children.

"Feeling" is a word that everyone uses, but in the context that I know it, it's far more than day-by-day emotions, happiness, or sadness. The feeling I speak of, the feeling I know that wants so much to be restored is that deep, deep inner feeling of reality of heart, of knowing My presence in your life, and knowing one another in one another's hearts at the same time, discovering Me through your relationships and our bond together. That's the restoration of the lower legs and the feet, again the bonding of heaven and earth and, therefore, the bonding of your own families, not only your family but many families. So, again, I have to say that last night was an important step in a very immediate and also a very long-range way.

Your husband has gone through a challenging week in recognizing that his own connection to the earth is sometimes tenuous, because he is very quick to catch feelings of the heart and internal things. This is why you'll find that his realization or his expression can be very rich. But the historic problem of many people who are sensitive in that way is that many times they have a hard time making the things they feel a reality. With many artists, particularly, the reality becomes their canvas or the thing they create.

Yet, you'll find that in many artistic lives there are tragic relationships because of the inability of the artistic person to fully and freely express in relationships those feelings that are within. And another point here is that narcissism has been a problem in the arts--loving the feelings so much that, in a sense, they don't want to give them up by involving too much in relationships with people who may not understand. And, therefore, the canvas is a much better friend because it receives what you want to put there and what you felt.

It reflects you very completely, but for many artists there's almost the feeling of "I can't express this to many people because they probably can't appreciate what I have to say," and many times there is a block in relationships. So, this is a problem. Yet, it's been very good for your husband, too, this process of coming to know Me, because in that way he knows that My heart goes out to all people. All the people around him are My sons and daughters, and as his heart has begun to break through with Me, he has to acknowledge My heart in and for each and every person. It's not merely artistic feelings but truly the feelings of parent-child that he has experienced.

This matter of becoming a child again and growing through that parent-child relationship is a very big thing for him. As you know, many years ago he had to face the reality of his relationship with his mother, but the relationship with a father has been mysterious for him due to the fact that he hasn't even one memory of his own father. And I know that he would like even one memory that he could relate to. It would be like a pole or a pillar for him, to be able to touch and pat and feel that solidness, but there's nothing there for him.

So, I see that he also has an injury that is similar to yours, in a way, and that is the abstract father that he wishes he could remember. He knows he had a father because otherwise he wouldn't be here, but that abstract father passed on. Then, My own Fatherhood, as powerful as it has been for him, is still a relatively abstract experience. Indeed, to be able to become a real father himself out of these experiences is still a journey for him. It's something that may come much more easily and naturally to a man who grew up with a father and went fishing, hunting, had many bonding experiences with his own father. So, as you may feel a loneliness at times, so, too, very deeply there is a loneliness in him because he doesn't have those memories that could be very substantial. I made the family this way because it was meant to reflect our own relationship and to be a concrete playing out of your relationship with Me as your Divine Parents. Without that family experience, people are truly crippled.

That's why the situation of the United States today is a very fearful one, even though the politicians speak a great deal about family values. The reality of your nation is that your family foundations have been shaken in the past few decades with the loss of morality, the loss of a spiritually-based relationship between men and women.

There are many causes, but essentially the families in your nation are crying out for a redefinition. And what you call "family" very often has nothing to do with family; therefore, you have many young people growing up in the world who not only have no experience of true parents, but who have miserable experiences with people who had those children physically, yet who have absolutely no standard to raise those children. And when you bring in the problems of drugs and alcohol, all of these things that take people away from responsibilities that they need to face clearly and maturely, then you have horrible rot within your country.

Yes, people take these drugs and alcohol and so on because they don't want to face the pain and the challenges around and within them. They want to kill those very real challenges and cover them with a veil of false bliss, very hellish bliss. So, waking up to life and taking responsibility day by day is no small matter, and that, in so many ways, is the process of restoration.

In your own relationship, you W and H [husband], have to work with and bear with each other. Don't lose hope. Don't lose your vision for each other. You can never understand the depth of what it was when humanity fell away from Me spiritually. It was a profound break, and the culture that has come out of that relationship is far worse in terms of its injury than your leg injury, W. Much pain. Much pain, and at the same time a numbness and, therefore, no connection between what the heart and mind want to do, what the feet can do. This is a very deep healing that has to occur. So, you're in a unique position to really understand this. In helping you with your walking and your steps to try to build your muscles and, hopefully, start to have more feeling in those lower legs, your family can have a very meaningful experience.

Indeed, this is the process of building the Kingdom as well, allowing My family to begin to feel again, to feel My heart, to feel My perspective, to understand it and then to begin to develop deeper and truer feelings for one another and even for yourself. I am proud of you for your efforts. I am very happy to have seen those steps last night; I was with you and I, too, wanted to take out My camera, take a picture and be able to share it with everyone--to say, "See, My daughter is making progress now."

I want to be able to say that about so many people in the world. The worst cases of injury are not of the body but of the soul, of the heart and spirit. Sometimes it's far more difficult to heal from those internal injuries than it is from your serious injury to your body. Yet, I want to be able to stand with each one of those people and say, "See, you're making steps ahead; don't give up, keep going because each step is a step not only for your own healing but a healing for the world, in bonding together, in seeing your own healing and the healing of the world around you, and reaching out and recognizing that your step is a step toward the Kingdom. This is important.

One more point here that's very important is that many people who call themselves religious oftentimes separate themselves as individuals from the world or the whole, so to speak, and have developed a conscience and a consciousness that tells them that their life is not important; it's only the service to God that's important and, therefore, you have to go beyond your own suffering or pain and just serve God, serve others, serve the church. Yet, I tell you that the healing of those others, the healing of the world around you has every bit to do with your own healing. It becomes a tremendous contradiction if you yourself are trying to help others to walk when you're still in a wheelchair, and you're encouraging them to stand when you yourself are still crippled. Sooner or later people must realize this, must recognize that to come to the point of their own healing is not taking away from what they can do for the world.

They have to see and you must see that your steps and your personal healing is a part of the healing of the whole. Join those two processes as one in your heart and in your mind, and don't separate yourself and the whole. This is a great trick of My adversary, because he knows that this separation of the part and the whole and the contradiction that is in that separation basically renders My children ineffective. So, you need to integrate the understanding of yourself and the world around you and the Kingdom that you want to build. Integrate that. And when you take a step, then think that the world is taking a step.

Let your will and vision for yourself be the vision for the world. Recognize that when you move, the world moves; when you open to Me, the world is opening to Me. When you paint a wall, you have to take many brush strokes, but as you take many brush strokes the wall is closer to completion. As each of My children learns to take those steps internally to open the heart, to begin to come back to that original relationship with Me, with themselves, and with one another to heal, then that is one brush stroke on the wall of the Kingdom. So, your life affects the lives of many. Recognize that. What you do with your life is important.

This kind of contradiction seems very simple, but it's a very deep and historical problem that particularly people from the Judeo-Christian tradition have struggled with, this false conscience that is driven oftentimes to reach out to help others and, yet, had such a hard time to be helped and to allow itself to admit its own need. This contradiction is the very thing that creates hell in your world. It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So many times hell is made by people who have good intentions and, yet, who need to start with themselves. This is not selfish. It depends on how you look at it, how you see and relate with the world around you.

Again, to know the feeling of My heart and to be able to feel that in your own life will automatically lead you outward to see the world in a whole new way, to relate with the world in a whole new way. It will give you the light you need to challenge the things that have held you back in your relationships with one another. That's why I'm telling this son all the time, each day: Remember you're My son. You're My son. You're My son. What that means in the deepest sense is that you have nothing to fear; you have nothing to hold yourself in, nothing to hold you back. There's nothing that can hold you back when you have that knowledge deep within you and your own original mind is the center of your consciousness day by day.

Again, I want to say I'm very happy, and please work on your therapy day by day. Recognize that when you take a step, the world takes a step. As you discipline your feet and as you work on retraining and toning the muscles in your legs, even though there is still pain, this is a symbol of the steps of progress in your own family and toward the Kingdom. Don't ever think it's just selfish for you to be doing this. Then I'm very, very hurt, because you simply didn't understand how important it is.

I want to close and thank you for your sharing this morning. These are very valuable days; each one is to be lived to the fullest. We'll continue in the coming days.