When someone seems to close his heart to you, don’t mind. Sometimes someone turns their heart off, puts shutters up as it were, and keeps you out. They cannot accommodate the light of your sun at this time. For a while, their heart just can’t get warm, just like sometimes you shiver in bed no matter how many blankets you cover yourself with. So their heart shrinks away from love.

You know how sometimes you cannot focus on learning trigonometry or following the directions of how to put a bicycle together? That’s how sometimes someone’s heart just can’t focus on love. Their heart becomes a turtle that goes within and cuts itself off from the outer world. Or their heart becomes a snail hiding in its delicate shell. Their heart is sealed for a little while, or a long while. Because their heart is sealed, it doesn’t mean that you have to close yours. You just have to respect theirs.

At these times, the love in your heart has to be so great that it can allow someone else to close their heart. Maybe they have been out in the sun too long. Maybe they are putting a band-aid over their heart. Maybe they are taking a deep breath. Maybe they are doing the best they can.

This points to the importance of your not taking anything personally. Even if it is personal, you can’t take it personally. If you do, you are affronted. If you don’t take it personally, you are not affronted. Compassion comes from not taking another’s seeming heartlessness personally. If Christ had seen lepers’ wounds as an offense, how could he have healed them? If your heart bleeds because someone else’s does, how much compassion can you have then when you are nursing your own wounds?

When someone has to withdraw from the arena of your heart, then bless them. They are healing. Only they are healing in a way different from the way you want them to. That is all that is happening.

And if someone wants to divorce themselves from you, they don’t have to think about it the same as you. They are free to withdraw, and you are just as free to be unscathed as you are free to be scathed. Beloved, wounds are not something you have to catch as you might a cold.

Sometimes what you perceive as love given to you hops around like a jumping toad.

Can you be a little glad that someone’s personal love had visited you? You can be sorry that it did not stay, and yet, you do not have to mourn its passing. What is passed is passed, and you cannot make it prisoner. You are also freed. Certain parameters that were set up no longer work, and so now you need different boundaries or, better yet, none at all.

Love without freedom is not love at all. Captive love is not love. No one is beholden to you. No one. No one on Earth is beholden to you. Only I am beholden to you in the sense that I can do nothing but love and be with you. I am beholden to Myself. To be away from you is not even a thought I can contain. It is beyond My imagination. If I am love, I am love, and I am naught but love. I do not know fickleness. I am not a God of moods. I am a God of love, and there is nothing else I can be. And why in Heaven would I ever consider anything else? I know what I AM. The only love you must have is Mine, and that you have, beloveds, that you have.