Surrender starts with an openness that We can call receptivity. Receptivity is more than a willingness. It is willingness but it is willingness freed. If willingness is an open door, with receptivity, you have already opened it and now it is always open. You have stepped over willingness. You have entered the threshold of openness that lies beyond willingness. Willingness contains a little thread of control as if you deigned to willingness. But with openness, you have passed a threshold from which you cannot return.

There is no decision to make. Before you may have had the wisp of a thought: "Shall I open the gate of my love for God? If so, how wide and for how long?" And so you kept your foot a little bit in the door so you could close it if something did not seem quite pleasing to you. But once opened, and you find yourself standing before an unimagined vista, you are incapable of slipping back into an earlier state of consciousness. It is not possible that you could, and it is not possible that you would want to. When you are inside My heart, you are inside My heart. Your own state of consciousness keeps you here where you have always wanted to be.

What is the key that turns willingness into the fact of openness? The best word for it would be "gratitude", but gratitude is not quite the right word, for gratitude sounds like a commodity or a decision or a standard to be adhered to. It is not that you picked up the key of thankfulness in order to open the gates wide. It was more magic than that. You didn't pick up the key. Suddenly you found it in your hand.

You found your heart full and to that fullness you gave the name gratitude. Your heart said a simple Thank You, and it was to Me your heart spoke. Thank you was not your password. It was not your test. But it was your Open Sesame. With your heart full of the overflowing love named thankfulness, you could only be swept into the openness of My Heart and call that openness yours. Your heart opened, you think, but, really, you entered Mine. But then, of course, what is the difference?

What is this thing you call surrender? What is it you surrender? And to Whom? You surrender your hold on certainty. You surrender unfounded beliefs you found somewhere on the street or that were handed to you and which you accepted in unawareness. Now you surrender yourself to the forces of Truth and Love.

Heretofore, you have kidded yourself considerably, all in the name of being realistic. Heretofore, you sacrificed that which you truly hold most dear, the love of God and all the vastness contained therein. So now in surrender to Me, your Greater Self, now you stop sacrificing and begin to hold in front of you that which in truth you have always held most dear. I have always had a hallowed part in your heart, whether you turned your face to Me or not.

You could not put Me away, but you put away your awareness of Our Connectedness. You dispatched the core of your heart somewhere fanciful in trinkets and condiments.

Now you know that in surrender to Me you surrender nothing. You gain everything. There is nothing to surrender but conviction, pain and suffering, tension and nervousness. You will give them up. You will finally be done with them. You will cry, "Enough!" You will cry, "God, my Beloved!"