Divine love is the only love there is. It is you appropriation of divine love and your use of it that determines how you experience God. For a person who is very open and accepting, a person who is very loving and forgiving, the presence of God is an integral part of their life. For a person who is closed-minded and judgmental, the presence of God is something that happens, they think, after they leave the physical body.
Your concept of love and your participation in it determines very much how you see God. If you see God as a judgmental figure who is going to lurk about, looking over your shoulder and judging you in every little thought you think and every little deed you do, then you are not going to have an experience of love from God. You are going to fear God and one never loves what one fears.
To know God is to open oneself to love and that is an extremely scary thing for just about anyone on the earth. There immediately flashes before your mind’s eye all of the things that could go awry and all of the pain that could come to you; all of the lack of trust that you have experienced in the past; all of the things that are going to make you feel that maybe it isn’t worth it or that maybe it is safer to wait until after you leave the body and then know God.
Of course, you can do it that way. You have free will. However, you are going to soon discover that after you get to the other side, as you call it, or after you leave your physical body, if you closed God out here, out of fear, you are going to find that it isn’t any easier over there to know God than it was here because your fear will have created for you a belief system that is going to not allow you to take it in even though you are without a body.
The only difference in being dead, as you call it, and being alive, which always was a puzzlement to us (angels), is the fact that you don't have a physical body. Otherwise, the concepts that you held and the belief systems that you practiced remain with you in your consciousness even when you leave the physical form. The difference is that over there you have an opportunity to learn more rapidly and to dismiss from your consciousness those ideas that are not correct or not in line with the flow of divine love.
It would be impossible for your finite minds to grasp the infinite expansiveness that is God. However, when you can recognize that your individuality is not limited in any way, but is a part of that infinite vastness, that you as an individual are as vast and as all-encompassing as the God that you pursue, then you will come into a closeness to that God. When you were brought from Divine Flame, the whole purpose of this was for you to become ever more, ever more, more, to expand, to grow, to include.
There is nowhere where God is absent. If you were to turn your thoughts in that direction, you would soon find that your ability to understand would take in everything. Then when perplexities came upon you, instead of judging them as being a punishment or a karma, you would come to recognize that they are merely an experience from which you will glean a great and beauteous lesson.”
10/23/2022 Blog. Archangel Gabriel, HOW YOUR LIFE AFFECTS GOOD, Pgs. 19-20. Copyright © 1997 Rev. Penny Donovan. All rights reserved. Photo: 60729327 © Lithian | Dreamstime.com. To purchase this booklet, please contact: sherry@sacredgardenfellowship.org