When a friend has been inadequate in some way and has let you down, when your friend has been thinking and feeling small and revealed their tightness to you, then you start to feel the same miserliness in your heart. Is that not so? You mimic the friend, and blame your friend's inadequacy for your own feelings of smallness.

Miserliness is stinginess. You start to feel miserly in your heart. Smallness is stinginess. It is holding back. And now the tendency is for you to start feeling the unhappy pinched way your friend felt. There is something in My children that seems to want to perpetuate smallness. It is not revenge, yet it is a feeling of responding in kind. "My friend was unfeeling to me. Now what can I be but unfeeling to him or her?"

And so you mirror your friend.

When your friend is warm and gracious, that is a time to mirror your friend.

When your friend is cold and ungracious, then that is a time for you to become a mirror of graciousness for your friend to look into.

Be a picture of what your friend was not. Be what you would have wanted your friend to be. Do you see how essential it is that you respond differently?

Your friend was coming from a place of lack. You don't need to follow your friend to that place. You need to give your friend something else to copy. This is not about your friend any longer. It is about you.

This will benefit your friend certainly. Most of all, it will benefit you. And, beyond a doubt, it will benefit the Universe.

Do not act in kind.

You are to serve Me and respond on My behalf. For whatever perceived reason or no reason your friend exhibited lack of courtesy, you are the one to break the cycle before it starts. Ultimately, what is smallness but lack of courtesy?

Your friend perhaps did not show respect for you. Your friend was not respecting himself, or he would not have been disrespectful to you. He did not think before speaking or acting. And now you must be the one to think before speaking or acting. He was thinking of some perceived need of his. He wasn't thinking of you. Yet, now, it is for you to think of him.

Remind yourself that somewhere, buried within the person who hurt your feelings, I exist. And, of course, you exist.

Your friend made a mistake. If your friend had been clear-thinking, he would not have acted unkindly. Obviously, your friend was not thinking clearly.

I am not asking you to forgive your friend for an offense. I am asking you to rise above offense in the first place. Can you forgive your friend for being a human being who sometimes acts in error?

Beloved, you are acting in My place. How do I respond to you when you are not thinking straight and make an error? I do not act in kind. I do not shun you.

If your friend were not thinking straight, all the more reason for you to think straight.

Other people are not to overly influence you on how you feel about yourself. Feel about yourself in all circumstances as I feel about you.

I am not saying that you cannot move on to other friends. I do tell you to be with people who feel good enough about themselves that it is happiness for you to be in their presence.

If you must leave your friend, I am saying that you leave as a friend, that's all.