Chapter 4 - Our Gift to God

There is no gift of faith that God does not accept with gratitude. He loves His Son. And as He gives His gifts to him, so is He grateful for the gifts His Son gives Him. Gratitude is the song of Heaven, the single harmony of all creation at one with its Creator. For gratitude is love expressed in joining; the necessary condition for extension and the prerequisite for peace. And who can be in conflict and love God?

We have discussed the gifts of God to you. Now we must also speak of those that you can give to Him. For it is these that render His giving, complete, as it is His to you that make you whole. Giving is joy and holiness and healing. Here is your answer to the world, and God's as well. For here it is you join with Him, His likeness being yours in this alone.

How can you give to Him Who has no lack, no need, no emptiness, no unlit place which needs a light that you can offer Him? He saves your gifts for you. He does not know of giving and receiving. What is love, or comes from love, or offers love a gift, is one to Him because it is of Him. To Him and from Him are not different to One Who has no opposite. For love is all there is and everything there is. A gift to love is given everyone, not lessening the giver, nor in truth adding to the receiver. More than love there cannot be. But this a gift becomes if it is truly given and received by both to both who know that they are one:

a key to silence and the peace of God,

a glad acknowledgement of love of Christ,

a greeting to the Holy Spirit's help,

an invitation that He enter in

and lift the Son of God unto Himself.

What more would God hold dearer, than this? These are His gifts as much as they are yours, for in them giver and receiver join. A gift is holy only when there is no sense of all of who will gain thereby, and not a shadow of a thought of loss. It is not easy in the world to know what giving means, and how to give a gift that God and all creation will accept as shining outward from a thankful heart and inward to the altar of its God.

God gives the grace to give as He must give, for He must give the only way He knows, and what He knows is everything He is. Christ gives as He does, being like Himself. And nothing stands outside the gifts They give, for every gift is all-encompassing and lifts the universe into Their arms.

Yet what of you who seem to be on earth, and do not understand what giving is because you have forgotten what love means? What gifts are there that you can give to God? My brother, there are many calls to you from those who lost their way and need your help in finding it again. It seems to you that you are helping them if you respond to what they ask and what you think they need. Yet it is always God Who calls to you, and he who asks your help is but yourself. Who is the giver and the receiver then? Who asks the gift and who is given it?

This is the only lesson that the world must teach in giving. It is not the one the world was made to teach. And yet it is the one the Holy Spirit sees in it, and so it is the only one it has. Forget the other devastating ways the gifts of earth are given and received. Forget the cost, the thoughts of loss and gain, the bargaining, the counting of the score, the world associates with every gift it gives in strict accordance with its laws. The money-changers of the market-place have been your teachers. Now they need a gift they could not give. Be savior now to them because you have another Teacher now.

Count not the cost of giving. There is none. Your teachers have deceived. But do not think that their mistakes were not your own as well. To all who do not understand the gifts of God and Christ are one, be yours the voice that echoes what the Voice for God would say:

"Save Me, My brother, as you save yourself,

And let Me give to God your gifts for you

Because My altar waits for them in love,

And God is asking that We place them there."

There is no love but God's; no gifts but His. We but return his Own unto Himself. But as we do, He comes to call His Son from the far country where he threw away the memory of all his Father's gifts, and ask him to return again to Him.

Child of Eternal Love, what gift is there your Father wants of you except yourself? And what is there that you would rather give, for what is there that you would rather have? You have forgotten Who you really are. What but that memory is dear to you? What trifling gifts made out of sickly fear and evil dreams of suffering and death can be the substitute you really want for the remembrance of Christ in you? In the far country you were lost indeed, but you were not forgotten. Hear the call of love to love, by love, in love to you, and rise with love beside you to return the gift of love that He has given you, and you have given Him in gratitude.

Do not forget the Source of what you are, and do not think He has forgotten you. Love does not waver, and does not forget the gifts it gives that it would have you keep. Return them, then, for it is dark indeed in the far country, where God's memory has seemed to disappear. Yet Christ has come wherever you have gone. For you are His, and being His you are His Father's too. He brings with Him the gifts His Father gave, and giving them to you He teaches you how to return them in the way He gives. Light knows no limit; love no lessening. Return, My Child, to Me. For Christ is He Who is My Son and you are one with Him. You are My gift, for you are one with Me.