VI. The Acceptance of Your Brother
2 It seems to you that the Holy Spirit does not produce joy consistently in you only because you do not consistently arouse joy in others. Their reactions to you are your evaluations of His consistency. When you are inconsistent you will not always give rise to joy, and so you will not always recognize His consistency. What you offer to your brother you offer to Him, because He cannot go beyond your offering in His giving. This is not because He limits His giving, but simply because you have limited your receiving. The decision to receive is the decision to accept.
The reason I don’t think the Holy Spirit produces joy in me consistently is that I don’t always see the effects of it in others. I don’t always arouse joy in other people. Instead of questioning the Holy Spirit, I might look to myself. Am I receiving what the Holy Spirit would give me? The Holy Spirit is always giving, but I block His gifts if I am unwilling to accept them.
If I block the Holy Spirit and do not allow Him to inspire joy in me, I won’t inspire joy in others and then take this as proof the Holy Spirit is inconsistent. I have finally learned that this is never true. I no longer question the Holy Spirit, but understand that He is always giving and it can only be me who is allowing the ego mind to block what He would give.
There was a time when I treasured my bad moods and defended them from anything that threatened to lift them. I defended my identity of one who is depressed. As my mind opened more and more to healing, I released that to the Holy Spirit. I used to treasure my identity as one who was unpredictably angry and whose tongue was sharp, whose words were weapons. I thought it was the way I defended myself against the world. As I learned to release my fear to the Holy Spirit, I no longer needed my defenses, and instead, I extended the joy and the love I received from the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit consistently extends love because that is what He is. He extends it to me because He knows that is what I am. As I lay down more and more of my defenses, I am learning to receive the love that is coming my way. As I receive it, I give it as naturally as does the Holy Spirit. I am becoming more consistent in opening to love and so I am becoming more consistent in inspiring joy.
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