I extol effortlessness. Let everything you do be effortless. Let loving everything you do and everyone you meet be effortless. Who says it can't?

Who says life has to be toil and trouble? Who says that life must be effort?

Consider your heart like a fish with gills that swims. How smoothly the fish goes through the water! It is as light as a bird in the water. Nothing blocks the fish. He just keeps swimming and swimming and goes where he wills. The fish loves swimming, and the fish flaps its wings, as it were, and takes flight in the water. The fish soars.

One wave of love brings another.

One wave of love meets another corresponding wave.

Love waves its hand, and somewhere in the universe, there is a wave back. One wave always means another.

Love never stands still. By its very nature, it must move. It relinquishes itself. It rolls itself over into another wave, splashes itself, and makes it known that all there is in the entire universe is wave after wave of love.

How effortless is love!

How full of effort everything else is! Effort is another way of saying going against the grain. The grain is love.

Sometimes you think you have to put effort into love because your heart is perhaps not open to everyone on the planet. But love is easy. It is not an effort of will or determination. You cannot grit your teeth and love at the same time.

You have somehow exerted great effort not to love. You thought you had to pull the reins on your love, that you couldn't allow yourself to splash everywhere, only in prescribed places, only in certain directed paths, as if your love depended on conditions outside you, as if anything but love is relevant to love.

It is not for you to master love. Love is evidence of the Divine. You do not master the Divine. The Divine is not a possession you have. The Divine is your nature. It is pure love spouting from your heart for the joy of itself. It loves to spill over. It doesn't like to be contained. It doesn't want to be measured, meted out in dribs and drabs. It is the Divine within you that pours out love. Would you dictate to the Divine how much or when and where?

Love is infinite. There is no container big enough. Your mind is like a plug that stops up love. Your mind is thinking and doing and forgets being. Your mind is an arbitrator when, in love, there is no need for arbitration.

When Christ said to love your enemies, he was saying, Love even the figments of your imagination. Your mind made up a story about enemies, and, like genies, they appeared. You thought your negative thoughts existed outside you, but they were your own hens come home to roost.

In the case of Christ, those who injured him were not his enemy. He knew not enemy. But they didn't know who they were, and they had mistaken Christ for something else as well. The fact that there were those who saw Christ as their foe is proof enough that enemy is a made-up thing.

The expression is that you make enemies. Yes, that's true, you make them. You could just as easily make friends.

But what overtures have you made, or what resistances have you boarded your heart with? What have you been unwilling to disband within yourself? What within yourself have you resisted and pasted the responsibility for onto someone else?

To anyone now that you feel resentment toward in your heart, perhaps an apology is in order, and you are the one to make it. Somewhere along the line you have done a great injustice. You thought people were what you saw. You thought they were everything they were wrapped in. You forgot that surface was surface and you forgot the truth it hid. You hid the truth from yourself.

You who are capable of greatness are very capable of forgiveness, and so you must forgive yourself for having hardened your heart of love. It got warped in certain areas, and now it is for you to soothe it back into its original shape.

You have seen parts instead of wholeness.

You have seen parts in others instead of their radiance.

Start over again today. Erase the past. Refresh yourself with new eyes that more closely reflect Mine. What are you waiting for? Oh, no, have you been waiting for the world to change? Don't you know you are the changer of it?

I sent you to show the world how.

The last person you saw — you didn't know who they were. You thought they were the picture you drew of them. How little you knew, and how much more you know now. How much more you will retrieve from life now. And how much more you will give to it and all the souls who wend their way along beside you.

It is enough to be in the presence of love. Love does not have to be personally given to you. You do not have to have more love than someone else. You do not have to have the love of one particular person. No one’s love belongs to you anyway. Love is for everyone. Be secure in love. You do not have to have greater love as proof that you are love-worthy. You are love-worthy now.

Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is fulfilling My Will.

Remember My Will isn’t duty. You are not to be dutiful. What fun is there in obligation? Obligation is like buttons on a shirt. The buttons are not the shirt. They are just the means by which you close the shirt. Obligation, like with buttons, is something you do to be done with it. Buttoning, like obligation, is not generally your joy. No, you don’t fulfill My Will from any sense of obligation. Fulfilling My Will is quite different. It is more like wearing a silk shirt that fits you.

What you do to help miracles along is to bless every situation. Bless it with your positive attention on it. No matter how negative a situation, come from the perspective of blessing. This is taking your hands off the exigencies of a situation. This is returning your attention to Me and attuning to Me. You will vibrate to Me. This is effortless. By lowering the flame under the stew, or turning it off, you allow it to cool. You no longer fan the flame of distress with your thoughts.