The threads of your life are coming together. Your heart is on the line. No longer can you portray yourself as you may have portrayed yourself in the past. You are coming to the plate. You are at bat. You cannot get away with what you once thought you got away with. Now you swing, and the ball is thrown back to you quickly and becomes a hot potato.

You never did get away with anything. You paid your price. You always did. It may have been an IOU. Your IOU always got picked up somewhere somehow.

Others may also have paid a price for your misdemeanors. They may have been innocent bystanders who happened to be in front of you. That is how it is. One who offends is a bystander. Most likely, you offended yourself. You offended yourself because you approve too little of yourself or not at all really. And so you have to be bolstered. How dare someone not value you enough to help you forget your disavowal of yourself?

You want utter approval from others to make up for your appraisal of yourself. You have to have it. If you don't have it, you are desolate. If you loved yourself, you would never take the offense you take now. Whenever you take offense, you yourself have taken it. You whisked it out of the ether. The expression is that you took offense. You took it as one might shoplift. You take offense on your own say-so.

You pay yourself back for taking offense. You don't let yourself get away with it. You slap your own hand. You punish yourself with anger and grudge. You still are convinced that someone has something to do with you. You have something to do with you. I would say that you have punished yourself enough. Of course, I mean your self-inflicted punishment is not necessary. It may seem necessary to you because your ego resents someone else's ego.

Only on the level of ego do you take the offense you have taken. Now the day of offense is at an end. It is not love to take offense. It is not love to let hurt and anger and bitterness become your masters. Now is when you learn to love, not as a sacrifice, but as the culmination of yourself, the rising of yourself, from ego to love.

No longer do you take offense. It is no longer possible for you to take offense. This is not quite the same as forgiving. It is pre-forgiving. It is not even that. It is seeing truth.

Truly, the person before you is yourself, and I mean that on the relative level as well. The person whom you take offense at is reflecting you. The person may be a mirror image of you. If the person is so greedy, so are you greedy. If the person before you is so needy, so are you needy. If the person before you always thinks of himself first, so is it with you. If the person before you wants to be first in line at your seeming expense, so do you want to be first in line regardless of expense to another. You will even pay the price of anger and hurt and blame someone else for extracting them from you.

I am not giving you instruction, beloveds. I am telling you that you are rising to a new level. This new level of rising consciousness allows you to be generous. No longer do you have to be first in line. You are becoming content to usher others to the front and be happy about it. You are not losing your integrity. You are growing in love and so you simply naturally give more love. The lesson may have been hard, and yet now the loving is easy. It is where you are.