Perhaps the most sympathetic scriptural image offered to the person of faith in this age is the image of the lamb upon its creation. As I explain at Love Returns, the lamb was a device created from the Most High to be kicked around by angels afflicted with selfishness. It is the gateway through which the redeemed enter paradise when they can no longer escape the self-destructive consequences of selfishness, and so turn in desperation to Unconditional Love.

To be a servant of the lamb is to always be conscious, of those who torment you, that they are doing enormous damage to themselves. Forbearance and forgiveness are the rule of the day, lest they be able to accuse you of adopting their behaviors, and so lead others astray.

When that doesn’t work, of course, they resort to shouting you down. The most common trope is: “Well, you don’t care about people: look at all the victims that you’ve allowed us to create!”

Of course, they don’t characterize it that way. They see it as “giving people what they want.” It’s just that “what they want” is always an opportunity, and that opportunity is systematically snatched away or perverted. It’s a never-ending game of “give us what we want first, and then we’ll take care of you.”

My way throughout my life has been to walk away from these conflicts, knowing that the best that I can do is to focus on the gifts that God offers to those that nurture his creation, rather than exploiting it.

But I have before me one last chance to be of service to people: the hypnotherapy certification program at HMI. As I have navigated the personalities there, I’ve begun to have increasingly focused dreams about ancient history: the day-care center that hired girls from the porn industry and took out a restraining order when I gave a would-be seductress a poem about playing with my sons at the beach. The lawyer that offered to sodomize my sons “for their own good” and who tried to suborn perjury for the benefit of the day-care center. The ethnic cabal at the national laboratory that forced mid-level managers out of their jobs so that they could be filled with their co-religionists.

And now the owners of the company – one of them with deep ties into that ethno-religious culture that unites all of these persecutions – that I will leave as soon as I have established my practice.

So they attack the good will that I earn at HMI with constructive and appreciative comments to the instructors; with my moral and intellectual support of my peers; with the selflessness with which I approach therapeutic practice. They spin-doctor the persecutions as of my own manufacture, knowing that even the illusion of controversy will drive most people away.

They know that nobody reads this blog, and so feel that this writing presents no serious threat. But they forget that there is one who sees all. It took three billion years to create this opportunity to be freed from sin – which is the disease of selfishness projected onto others. The time for the harvest is near. It’s their loss: they’re going to have to do it all over again.

That’s the cost of denying me the opportunity to demonstrate the healing power of Unconditional Love. That’s the cost of turning away from real power.