God said:

It helps the Universe when you do not take happenings in life as an estimation of your worth. Because you do not win a prize you so desired does not mean you are less. Results in life are not to be viewed as your report card.

How many gifts you receive from Santa Claus at Christmas isn’t a scale that tells you that you have been good or bad. Do not believe this for one minute.

That you did not win the lottery yesterday means only this: You did not win the lottery yesterday. And, if today, you win the lottery, the meaning is simply: You won the lottery today.

In the world, you tend to draw conclusions. You do draw conclusions. You could draw a picture of a horse. You could draw a masterpiece of a horse. No matter how skilled an artist you may be, the picture is an idea. The picture is of a horse, yet the picture is not a horse. And this is how it is with words as well. Words carry the vibration of the meaning of a word, yet a word is not a complete entity of what it represents.

The word good carries a certain vibration. The word bad carries a certain vibration. Good and bad are judgments. Do not be so quick to judge yourself as lacking because something didn’t happen the way you wanted it to. Be cautious about making value judgments about yourself and anyone else.  
No matter how good you may be, you can fall down the stairs. No matter how bad you may be, you may not fall down the stairs.

God said:

Plow through. Sometimes you simply have to plow through obstacles. Yes, be a snow plow and keep going. Persist.

Because you have a hard time doesn’t have to mean you’d better stop. You may well be barking up the right tree. Don’t consider what you see as lack of support as a signal to stop. It may well be a signal to keep going, to keep going through rain and snow and floods and hurricanes, whatever the world throws at you.

The Earth persists. You are a microcosm of the Earth. Earth doesn’t stop because of obstacles. The world keeps spinning, and so must you. This world that may hamper you plows through.

Certainly, there is a reason for everything, yet you don’t know what the reason or reasons are. You can only guess.

In general, when you find life tough, you are being given an opportunity to become stronger. In a way, it is for you to become more committed to your service to Me. Even when wherever you turn, you are given no for an answer, or later for an answer, or a little pat on the head, for an answer, you can keep going onward and upward.

The key for you may well be to persist. You were in on a venture from the beginning and so you continue. If it is a business venture of your dreams, stay with it. Give it a good shot. If it is a spiritual venture for Me, stay with it. Most especially, when it is a venture for Me, persist and persist. If you are taking singing lessons and this is important to you, you keep learning to sing. You carry through.

God said:

The name of the game in the world is change. In the world, everything is changing a mile a minute. In the world there is speed. Nothing stays the same, or, not for any length of imaginary time does anything stay the same. Even puzzlement shows different faces. Truth, however, does not divert. The absolute exists in the world, yet far deeper and beyond the surface. The surface of the world is surface. Surface life is a lot like a train that is rushing to get somewhere. And when the train gets there, the train is off in a rush to get somewhere else.

Satisfaction in the relative world flits around. In the world of God, stability exists. No one rocks My boat, beloveds. You may well not see the depth, yet the depth is running the show no matter how random life may look to you. From the deep silence, My Will is done. The surface is souped up and all over the place. In the Silence, I reign.

The surface of life can make you cross-eyed. You try to make sense of it, and, often, this is not possible. Nonsense doesn’t make sense. All you can do is laugh or smile and let what has no decipherable meaning go.

You may like the idea of staying the same, living in the same house, never growing old, yet, when you think about it, you don’t desire this either. You are stalemated. You don’t want to change, and you don’t want to stay the same.

All of life in the relative world is about change, and change upon change.

God said:

Do you file yourself into a compartment and give yourself a report card before you go to bed at night? No longer file a report on yourself. You are not to be an appraiser of yourself.

It’s bad enough when the world sizes you up and finds you wanting. You are not meant to spy on yourself and tell tales on yourself.

You may be indiscernible to the world. In the world, you may need a make-over. In the world, you may be sized up right and left. To yourself, be a friend who likes you. Why assess yourself as if you were an auditor who must latch onto something?

It is your nature to grow. You will grow and thrive better without self-criticism. You do not need to caution yourself. What you need is to love yourself as if you were a growing flower in an oasis even you may be in a desert.

What happens too often is you put yourself in a prison cell and order yourself to grow to perfection. You find fault and whip yourself. You try to beat fault out of you.

Honor yourself instead. Find the good you did today and never mind anymore whatever chagrin you may feel because you find yourself imperfect. I tell you that you thrive every day. You make it every day. Whatever labor or standard you give yourself, no matter how high you lift the rope you give to yourself to jump over, no matter how many times you miss and trip and fall, you make it to the end. Let bedtime not be a time of self-recrimination. This is a time for approval. Put that idea in your pipe, and smoke it.

God said:

There are days you go through that seem to be beset with difficulties, one after the other. Sometimes it seems like you have weeks without sunshine in them.

One way to look at these times is that you are overburdened with them. Another way to look at these times is that you are quickly getting rid of a stock of difficulties that you would like to be finished with. Look at all the difficulties you can wash your hands of now. They occurred, and now there are fewer remaining difficulties to impose themselves into your life.

There are always other ways you can look at whatever you may be looking at. Let’s say you had a stock of 100 difficulties waiting for you. So now more of these pesky difficulties are out of the way. This could call for rejoicing. Why not? What is there for you to gain by deciding to be downcast?

You don’t have to greet difficulties with your chin out. You don’t have to let difficulties gnaw at your gut either. Accept difficulties in the palm of your hand. Take care of those you can. Those difficulties that you do not know how to solve, well, they, too, will go by the wayside.

You have heard before to count every difficulty as a blessing. You don’t know the whole story yet. How could something that causes you heartache possible be a blessing, yet this has happened, and this has already happened to you. The fish that got away can be good news. You may be luckier than you imagine.