I've always had a problem with the concept of "doing your best." It's seems like it's never enough or sometimes goes horribly wrong.... So I asked.
Ann: Jesus?
Jesus: Yes, Ann, it is past time that we had a talk about this. You have seen doing your best as an exercise in futility, one where the goalposts are constantly moved, where there is always something more that you could have done, never a resolution, a game where the odds are permanently stacked against you.
Richard?
Richard Burton: The problem, love, is that you are using a linear standard of measure, one which intrinsically has no end point so that inevitably you come up short. That is not the standard that our Creator has set for us. I should know, love, for I determined early on that there was no point in sustained effort on such a self-defeating task and instead spent my life flailing around looking for some sort of permanent lodestar.
Jesus: Well said, Richard – and you have now seen, not the error of your ways, but the fundamental misconceptions that perennially kept you – and many others – off track.
So let me suggest that each of you who struggle with this consider another way, a way that is not linear at all, not even three dimensional, but multiversal. For you are not just the body and soul that came down to this life in this place and time. You are a compilation of many efforts at embodying your Creator’s love, which means that as part of that endeavor, you must reach out your hand to the stalwart soul that has ventured once again into this heavy and radically charged atmosphere and recognize the enormity of the tasks you have set for yourselves.
It is not a task at which you succeed or fail. You simply have at it with everything you have, and with some luck and heavenly guidance you may pick off a speck of darkness or a wrongheaded idea, usually one that has erroneously put you at the center of your own universe. And then, as you experience your essence as part of the whole, you lessen the darkness, not just for yourself, but for the planet as a whole.
You don’t have to succeed every time to be doing “your best”, you simply have to keep coming back, throwing yourself into the fray with a smile in your heart knowing that the light within you is growing with each effort. Your best is not winning or losing, it is simply making the effort.
And when you come to a point, as we all do, that you have given what you have, you lay down your sword and shield with honor and retire from the lists. You don’t second guess yourself by saying you could have done more. You listen to the voice of love within your being that says rest, good and faithful servant, and know that, in that rest, is germinating your next best effort in this world or the another.
Richard: The thing to watch is your attunement with Spirit, the feeling that you walk together, that through darkness and strife, through happiness and revelation, you are part of the whole, and that, when you cannot see, you choose to believe that you are guided. That, love, is doing your best.
January 26, 2022
Image credit: Cartoonstock, CS438729, Order No. 528169.