July 29th 1966
...everyday difficulties…
…and we want you to know how near we are and that we can read your mind at any time. We are so close to you at this time that almost every thought is visible. We have been listening to your conversation and now we will enlighten you concerning the seeming difficulties which you have both encountered in the past.
While many people have had to deal with awkward, disgruntled folk, but in a good many cases this has simply been like attracting like. But, with you, dear children, and with your kind all over the world, this has not been so. It has been a test, a training.
Now here, we would like you to think for a moment of your friends and relations with gratitude and with love. For these very ones in their own particular state. Now think carefully as to what we are saying. These very ones, in their particular state, are helping enormously. And have been picked to help with your training. You see, a person who would be trained for any athletic sport, would train, would have to train, if he was going in to swim, in sometimes very rough waters. It would be very good. The climber, the one who reached the very top, must train sometimes in bad weather, in so-called bad conditions, But these conditions are helping him to achieve, to reach the top. To reach the other side of the hill.
Now these relatives and friends will grow up into your aura, into your conditions with their varying temperament even their seeming selfishness, help you to develop your own compassion, your own humility, your own unselfishness. Because you knew and you know. And although you knew, and although you know now, you continue to do what you feel you must do because love, God, the Spirit of Christ within you, prompts you without the thought of any reward.
But it is pleasant, children, that you have met, and that you can give and take one from another with love knowing that it is received and returned, is in itself a reward. The reward of love draws unto itself, love.
Now you will think about this and you will find that these seemingly selfish people will smile and you will feel grateful unto them for they have played a very important part in your training. If you had been surrounded by very, very, unselfish people, really kind, goodly folk, you would not have been able to achieve what you have done, for it would have been too easy. This is why, though perhaps not on the Earth, but they too will make the search and they too will come up against selfish people who they will have to guide without any reward.
All is well. All is in perfect order.
This transcript reframes difficult relationships not as bad luck or misfortune to be endured, but as deliberately assigned training — chosen companions whose particular selfishness or awkwardness exists specifically to develop compassion, humility, and unselfishness in the one who must deal with them. The analogy is athletic: a swimmer trains in rough water, a climber in bad weather, precisely because ease would produce no strength. Kind, easy company would have made the growth impossible — the very difficulty of these relationships is what made the achievement real.
This is close to the Stoic practice of treating obstacles and difficult people as material for virtue rather than as misfortune — Epictetus's teaching that it is not events but our judgment of them that troubles us, and Marcus Aurelius's repeated instruction to himself to meet the arrogant, the ungrateful, and the treacherous each morning not with surprise but with readiness, since dealing well with exactly such people is the day's actual work.
What's asked in return isn't approval or thanks for this training, but gratitude toward those who, often unknowingly, provided it — and the promise that they too, in their own time, will search, and will meet their own difficult people to guide "without any reward," completing the same circle from the other side.