I would like to recount a situation that happened to me and was a part of my life when I first came into spiritualism. I don’t particularly want to talk about myself because I don’t think that’s the right way to go about things, but just please accept me talking about myself in the context to tell this story.
What happened to me? I was on my way to the other kind of spirit, the one that comes out of an optic. And I managed to pass a spiritualist church. Things weren’t very good at that time for me. In fact, they were quite terrible. And after a lot of deliberation, I thought I’d go in and have a reading. So I went in there and sat down and waited my turn and found out what was going to happen and looked around.
It was all quite alien to me. Anyway, my turn came so I sat down and I had this reading with this lady and she brought me through certain people that had been in my life. Looking back now, it was quite an excellent reading. When it came to the end, she said to me that I’ll be like X amount of pounds and that kind of disgruntled me, because although I’d had that evidence of proof of life after death, that wasn’t really what I was looking for. I was looking for someone that was going to take away my problems, that was going to give me all the answers and the solutions to the problems in my life. It was almost as if I thought I was going to leave my situation with her and she was going to sort it out. Come to a bit of an embarrassing time with her really because I’m hanging on to my money that she’s asking me to pay her, andI kind of don’t want to let it go because in some type of fashion, I felt that I’d been robbed in some way.
One of the things that she said to me that hit home is that ‘it’s your life. You have to take control, you have to sort things out’. Now, at that time, I didn’t want to hear that at all, I was about allocating blame on other people and this was about allocating blame on what people had done to me, not what I had done to them. So I think it’d be fair to say that I come out of that reading very disgruntled and unhappy realising that they didn’t really have the help that I wanted.
It’s quite funny really now, because as I look back at that reading, it was more poignant to me now than it was at the time, because I now feel that I have a little bit more of an understanding of what was being said to me. I had no concept of what this medium was saying to me, and I was so eaten up with anger and the likes of being wrongly done by and unfairly accused that I just couldn’t see any other way out of my situation. I could only see what everybody had done to me, and me of course, I was squeaky clean and I suppose to a degree I was playing the victim. But as I say, as life goes on. I began to understand what was being said to me and how poignant the reading was now, because I actually understood what’s been said to me and some of the major things have really come out of my understanding and my forthwith marching into spiritualism.
We are in control of our situation. But we also have to realise that at times we hit the rocks, we run aground and things don’t go so well, we go into storms and have these types of situations. Then I began to realise that life is here for us to make decisions and to learn, they tell us that we’re ready for trial and atonement. I think that we’re beginning to understand as people what trial and atonement means, and I think what it means is that things are going to go wrong, things are going to go drastically wrong, and we will need to consider whether it’s worth doing different things, whether we should just not bother or whether we should just hide away – it’s very difficult. And then we need to understand what spiritualism is, not only to prove life after death, but to give us a philosophy and understanding so that we can solve and heal our own problems. Everything has an end and an opposite. If we have love, then we have to have rejection, if we have good, we have bad, and we have to experience all these types of situations so that we can get a full gambit of knowing where we stand. But whatever spirit gives us or whatever is there on offer is there for our taking.
What’s the biggest drawback as a human being? I suppose my biggest drawback was the fact that I couldn’t succumb to my emotions. I was angry and bitter and very difficult to rationalise. But then as I got older, I began to understand, began to let things go. And how do you let things go? There’s only one way of letting things go, and that’s by forgiving. But I do understand there’s things that happen in people’s lives where they feel that they just can’t apply that, and I understand it. Having said that, we’re all walking our road to recovery, we’re all walking our road of happiness and we’re all walking our road of love. I believe that we all want or need some type of love, some type of understanding, some type of caring. In general as people we’re lucky because we can understand that spirit can come close to us and give us that upliftment when we need it. Spirit does match us to people, they put people around us and they put people in our way and I don’t believe that anything within the great white spirit is wasted.
Everything has a reason, everything has a logic. A lot of the time I get into the discussion about whether our lives are mapped out. I think that’s open to individual thoughts, isn’t it? But I believe there’s two roads that we can walk. One good and one perhaps not so good. I often wonder if we meet at the same part, the same road, if you like. I haven’t got hard and fast rules like that and I’m quite interested in anybody else’s views, so feel free to pass comment on what you feel.
Although one thing I do know is that we have freedom of judgment, so we can decide where we can go, we can decide what we can do. In fact, the reality is there’s nothing that we can’t do. At times our only hindrance or our only obstacle, is our own mind, and sometimes our own mind provokes fear, it provokes worry which stops us from moving forward. From claiming the love and the life that we deserve.
We decide that if we put ourselves in a bubble and we live within that bubble, no one can touch us. We’re free from any anguish or free from being hurt or being misunderstood. As we live in this bubble and we can’t let no one in, conversely, we can’t get out. And that’s a bigger shame because then we’re just denying ourselves the love, the beauty that the Good Lord has put there for us.
So if you find yourself in a situation where you don’t know what to do, you don’t know how or you haven’t got the courage. Perhaps you feel that you just haven’t got it within you, just think of someone who lives in the spirit world who loves you, who loves you on the plane and who loves you now. Think of what they would want for you, think what they would expect you to be doing, think of love and happiness and the beautiful life that you want to have.
So if you can’t lift your understanding or your vibration for yourself, try and do it for them. They are all around us, they’re with us, supporting us, guiding us. But at times, friends, we just have to sit quiet and understand who we are and what we are. The reality is that we’re only human, we make mistakes and we get things wrong. But that’s good that you get things wrong, because then we learn.
That’s the greatest part and the greatest wonder of this reality in this world. So I’m going to leave you now with a few thoughts of spiritual loved ones, and I would ask you to bring your loved ones forward in your mind. Not only to communicate with me. But foremost to communicate with you. Just sit quiet. Bring that thought forward. Bring that love forward, God bless your friends and stay safe and never, ever forget you’re not alone.
- Address by Medium Ray Prendergast as part of our Divine service on 9th August 2020.
- Watch the full service here.
