When you have taken offense, you have taken offense. You took it. You accepted it. You didn’t have to take offense, but you did. You participated. You joined yourself to a remark someone made, or you took offense to a tone of voice, or an expression on another’s face, or a gesture, or a look in someone’s eye.
 
Whereas you are your brother’s keeper, you are to take responsibility for yourself in such a matter. No one makes you take offense. On another day, when you are exhilaratingly happy, you wouldn’t take offense. You would be too happy to take offense. What would it even matter to you what someone says when you just won a million dollars or the man of your dreams invited you to marry him?
 
By the same token, if your child had had a serious illness and was now declared free of the illness, you would rejoice. What would a careless statement that someone makes matter to you next to your child’s getting well? Not at all would it matter to you. You would not make any more of it than you would have about missing a bus.
 
Beloveds, you live in a relative world, and all that you garner hurt from is relative. Nothing is a big thing unless you say so. Life is all about what you relate it to. Listen to your remarks, and you will know what your life is like. If you complain, your life will be full of complaint. If life wrongs you, you will be full of wrongs. If life stirs you, your life will be stirring, bright, even brilliant. If life were your orchestra, then you orchestrate your life. Life plays your tune.
 
You are not only the receiver of your life. You are the inviter. You scatter the constellation of your life, and what you scatter, vibrates.
 
You have an agenda, beloveds, and some things make you happy, and some things make you sad, and, yet, nothing from the outside has the power to make you anything except as you say so. When your truth is that life is good, your life will be good. Life takes its cues from you. What cue card do you read? Life is awful, or life is beautiful. You are the one who leads the way. You have this power.
 
You may consider yourself powerless. When you consider yourself powerless, then you kneel before powerlessness. You submit yourself to it. You acquiesce to it. You declare powerlessness as true, and you hold yourself to it. The truth is that you are powerful. You are far more powerful than your mind can grasp.
 
What do you talk about? You will receive what you talk about. A horn blasts that echoes a preview you gave. You have resources within you that set the tone of your life. This is how we come back to responsibility again and again. Take responsibility, beloveds, or you tend to engender resentment.
 
Whatever happens outside you happens outside you. It may seem to have happened to you from out of nowhere. You may be more clueless than innocent, beloveds. Do you take offense at what I say? You are My most beautiful child, and I love you totally. I also call the shots as I see it, not as you might like Me to. If there is an error to your ways, I do not keep it a secret. Why would I? I honor you. I speak from My heart of love. Brighten up your life with bright thoughts. Is that so much to ask?