Good morning. W [wife], you shared many things this morning that are very important and central in understanding Me and our relationship together. These insights of yours have come at no small cost, because, as both of you will remember very clearly, there were times in your lives when these things you spoke of this morning would not have been as important to you as they are now. Now you have opened your eyes to see what is centrally true and important in life, and it’s very different from your thinking of even ten years ago or less. As you look at your own family and recognize where they stand on the road they have initiated in life, you must see that it is indeed a long journey to come to real understanding, particularly in the realm of the heart.

There are no shortcuts. Yes, I know that in your society today programs for self-improvement are very popular -- how to become a more loving and capable person, how to expand yourself spiritually, and so on. You could attend a program for a week, spend a few hundred dollars, and walk away with the prize. But in truth it’s not that simple. This is not to say that those programs are not of value. Many times they are put together by people who have had deep, rich, and powerful experiences in life.

What I want to bring to you this morning is a central point in dealing with those around you who, in your opinion, are still far from where they should be on their particular road. When you see that those around you do not yet recognize the importance of their relationship with the Divine or the meaning of living out of the heart, please think of how you react. This will be an important step for you in seeing what I am like and how to be closer to Me.

You as parents, particularly in relating with your children, are a copy of My relationship with you. I made it that way from the beginning so that you could grow in love through the same parenting process I have experienced. In that way, we would come to know each other deeply. This is an opportunity for you to know Me a little more deeply, too.

I want to stress one word here that may be a surprise to you. Before I mention that word, let Me recall a daily occurrence in your home, and that is dinner time. That is the time in your daily life when your family gathers around the table to have communion with one another and to share the food that your work has brought you. I am sure that hundreds of times you have cooked something that the younger family members look at and wonder, "What is this? Am I going to like this?" Particularly when it comes to salads, you will see the younger ones picking certain things out of the salads. "Mom, would you like my tomatoes?" or "May I take these tomatoes out? I don’t like tomatoes." Or it might be any of a number of things.

And you will look at each other secretly as if to say, "When are they going to grow up?" Sometimes it hurts your feelings when something you have put your heart into cooking is looked at like some sort of suspicious thing by your son or daughter, poked by the fork and removed. Let us talk about vegetables because (and this is famous and probably universal in the world) you’ll find that children, in large part, have a hard time with vegetables.

You know that if you were to put a side helping of candy next to the plate of vegetables, that most-loved of all foods for children would be gone very quickly. Or maybe the child would come back after dinner and pour the whole plate of candy in his pocket and walk away. You rarely see that happen with tomatoes. And here is the word I want to share with you: Appetite.

As you grow, your appetite changes. A child’s appetite, with very few exceptions, has to do with immediate gratification. There are very few children who think, "If I eat this food, it will enhance my strength twenty years from now or make me a stronger, more durable person as I grow old." Don’t kid yourself. In all history there are very few children who ever thought that way. That candy will rot their teeth and sap their energy, but it tastes so sweet, and sugar is a big motivator. You’ll notice those late-night snacks are not tomatoes, not radishes, not garlic; they’re something sweet, something that makes them feel good right away.

Isn’t that the way a lot of people live their lives? In fact, they have a hard time growing beyond (in terms of their emotional lives) the candy stage, the immediate gratification stage. If you look at your popular culture right now, immediate gratification is the menu of the day and not long-term growth or strength or health.

Well, this word appetite also applies very much to My relationship with each of you. It is very hard to help someone get in touch with Me or, even more so, to demand that they should get in touch with Me or pray if they have no appetite. It’s like trying to demand that your children appreciate a hated vegetable in their salad. You can’t demand it! They have no appetite for it and, therefore, the more you shout, the more you demand, it just becomes a larger and larger issue.

That’s the way many religious parents in history have turned their children away from Me. Frankly speaking, if I speak of all My children in the world, that’s how various faithful religious groups have turned the public away from me at times. They have used Me like a hammer to say, "If you don’t eat your spiritual vegetables, you’re going to suffer or go to hell." This kind of judgment and self-righteousness doesn’t do Me or My children any favors. No one benefits, including those who are making demands, because they polarize themselves from the society they are trying to convince and, also, from Me.

The painful and yet liberating reality is that an appetite must arise from within a person’s own life and from his own experience. You have faith that someday your son will pick up a tomato and hold it up as if it were a piece of gold and say, "This is something I love!" [laughter] And yet today you’ll not see it. In fact, it would be a joke if he did it now, and he would laugh, but at the age of thirty or thirty-five, he may discover a liking for tomatoes -- just as you,

H [husband], didn’t like salads when you were young and your mother tried to push them on you along with that awful dressing made of mayonnaise. It was like hell for you, and you had to bargain to take only three bites -- each bite almost gagging you. But somehow, over the years as you grew up, you began to want to go to salad bars. And now salads are one of the most enjoyable parts of the meal, with all the dressing you can pour on, because your appetite has changed. And so, to go more internally, it’s the same with My children’s relationship with Me.

Finding Me is not something that happens overnight. Those who have begun to find Me in their lives, those who have begun to find that appetite in themselves, will reflect on the process of how that appetite for Me came to be, how that hunger grew, and how it arose through great suffering or steep paths. When one person looks to another who seems to be far from having that appetite, how will he or she (who has already opened up his or her hunger for me) treat that one who has little or no appetite?

Did I ever demand from you, did I ever try to browbeat you into eating your spiritual tomatoes? No. I waited. I waited a long time for you to simply open the eye of the heart, because I know very well that until that moment there is no amount of lecturing or scolding that I can give you that will help you make progress in our relationship. It’s only as the heart opens that this can happen. And so it is with each and every individual who ever walked the face of the earth -- it’s when the heart is open.

Jesus spoke in parables because he knew that people who were waiting for something easy, waiting to be told what to do, or whatever, were putting the focus on Jesus as the one who was going to help them. But Jesus gave a parable because he wanted people to do some internal work, to open up those aspects of themselves through reflecting on what he was saying that could help them discover their appetite for God (for Me) and for a life that was transcendent of the often miserable lives they were living.

And so it is in your life also. Your life is a process through much experience and, hopefully, a growing ability to reflect, to go into the realms of the heart. Your life is a process of discovering that appetite, not just for immediate gratification but for something eternal, something that takes the road you are on and gives it an endless dimension -- and not only for you, but something that can allow you to look through new eyes as you look at your fellow human beings. Look at the world around you, because when you look at the world as your own children, much as you look at your children around the dinner table, you see the world in all different stages of appetite, from the most bestial to the most celestial, divine, and eternal appetites.

And what do you feel as you look at that? In one way you may feel heartbreak to see the pain that these selfish, immature appetites bring forth. You may also feel great hope as you see people climbing the mountains toward a true appetite and a reality of that divine nature within them. But as you can truly see that way, one thing you can begin to put an end to in your life is all the judgment about people, about yourselves, about your family, about the world itself. You begin to become very sensitive to that person or situation that is bringing forth truer and deeper appetites. And this is what I long for you to be.

In one way the word "facilitator" is appropriate here. The facilitator is one who seeks for one little indication of someone’s opening up and then tries to find the way to help that person emerge more and more toward a good direction, a true and positive direction. And so, in a way, that is your role, too. And that is My role. The idea that I come with judgment to separate the righteous from the unrighteous is basically a reflection by religious people down through history, a reflection that comes more from the way they are and not the way I am. They want to make Me into their image because often they carry these false swords of judgment on the world. They want to swing those swords freely and cut off heads, because those people don’t seem to have an appetite for Me and because they seem to still have an appetite for the non-spiritual, the non-divine.

Yet, would you do this to your child? He doesn’t want his tomatoes, so you pull out a paring knife and stab him? Is that how you will train him to love tomatoes? No. That would send him to the psychiatrist somewhere down the road of his life, full of rage. So it is not necessary to be more and more creative in helping him to appreciate the tomatoes in the salad, but it is really with your parental heart that you will help him grow -- not just with the salad but in every aspect of his life. Find those moments when he has had a realization or a tough experience, or a certain kind of experience that shocked him into an awakening state, or a time when his eyes suddenly opened to a new reality. Then, in that moment, you feel so much joy, because it’s the moment when you can have some extraordinary communication with your child, more than when the child is just in his daily, humdrum type of thinking.

And these are the moments I wait for with you, because in really opening up those moments, you start to develop a truer and truer appetite in terms of our relationship. As that appetite grows, it becomes finally, if you can believe it, the only appetite you have. This is down the road for you because now you still have many appetites. Remember when Jesus said in the Bible, "Let your eye be single." Let your eye be single. In other words, don’t be looking in all different directions at the same time. You have no focus that way.

This morning I would say to you, Let your appetite be single, because if, on one hand, you want to eat that healthy food and, on the other hand, you want to eat from that candy bowl, well, what good can it do you in the end? You have to go one way or the other. So, though it is a process of time and not an overnight matter, build that appetite for the things we can share, the true things you can share with the world around you. That is what will make you happy, and that is what will give you an eternal path, a path on which many can join you. There will be a wisdom that comes out of the development of this kind of appetite within you, a wisdom that will help you deal with people and with the circumstances of life that come to you day by day. I can guarantee it.

You can develop a divine patience as well. You know, some people think patience is not a virtue because it means waiting, waiting, waiting, and not pushing things ahead. But patience with the passion of the heart is a great virtue. What I mean by that "passion" is, in essence, that appetite, that passion that comes out of the relationship that we have together and that (as a result) comes out of your relationship with the world around you.

As you see people you know and love beginning to open the eye of the heart in even the tiniest way, then, on the one hand, you can be patient to wait for that moment, and, on the other hand, when that moment comes, you can be there for that person, and I can use you to reach that person. It’s not just you; it’s Me. I want to use you to reach out. And yet of the people who lived and died by My name in the past, so many of their ways of reaching out have been very subjective and very wrong and, as I said before, actually turned people away from Me.

Reflect on these things. And next time you put a bowl of tomato salad in front of your youngest boy, just remember what I said.

I’m going to leave it at that this morning. It’s only one portion of our communication and not the final or complete message. But is there ever an ending to it? That’s why I gave you the gift of eternal life, because there is an ever-growing process. We will take the steps as they come. We will uncover the beauty as we come to it.

I would like to ask W to pray.