Just when it looked like I’d be working part-time forever, I received a surprise offer from
another radio station in town to come over and do their afternoon drive-time show. They’d
caught my weekend gig and liked what they heard—but Medford is not exactly a big radio
market, and I was offered $900 a month to start. Still, I was working full-time again, and able
to leave the campground. I’d lived there over nine months. It was a time I will never forget.
I bless the day I trudged to that park, lugging my camping gear with me, for it was not the end
of my life at all, but the beginning. I learned in that park about loyalty and honesty and au-
thenticity and trust, and about simplicity and sharing and surviving. I learned about never
resigning myself to defeat, yet accepting and being grateful for what is true right here, right
now.
So it isn’t just from movie stars and famous authors I have learned. It’s from homeless people
who befriended me, and from people I see every day people I encounter as I go through life.
The mailman, the grocery clerk, the lady at the dry-cleaners.
All have something to teach you, something to bring you as a gift. And here is a great secret.
Every one of them came to receive a gift from you as well.
What is the gift you have given them? And if you have, in your confusion, done what you
imagine to have hurt them, do not assume that this is not, too, a gift. It may have been a
great treasure, as was your time in the park.
Have you not learned from your greatest hurts, sometimes even more than from your
greatest pleasures? Who, then, is the villain, and who is the victim in your life?
You will have reached real mastery when you can come to clarity about this before, rather
than after, the outcome of an experience is known to you.
Your time of destitution and desolation taught you that your life is never over. Never, ever,
ever think that your life is over, but know always that each day, each hour, each moment is
another beginning, another opportunity, another chance to re-create yourself anew.
Even if you do this at the last possible moment, at the moment of your death, you will have
justified your entire experience, and glorified it before God.
Even if you are a hardened criminal, a murderer living on death row or walking to your
execution, this will nonetheless be true.
You must know this. You must trust it. I would not tell it to you were it not so.
(17)Seventeen
That is the most hopeful thing I have ever read. It means that all of us—even the “worst” of
us—have a home in Your heart, if we will but claim it. And this must be what it means to have
a friendship with God.
When I began this book I said I hoped to focus on two things:
how to turn a conversation with God into a real, working friendship, and how to use that
friendship to apply the wisdom of Conversations with God in day-to-day life.
And now you are learning what I said to you before— that your relationship with God is no
different from your relationship with each other.
As in your relationships with other humans, you begin with a conversation. If the conversation
goes well, you develop a friendship. If the friendship goes well, you experience true Oneness.
This is what all souls desire with each other. It is what all souls seek with Me.
The idea behind this book was to show you how to develop that friendship, once you’ve had
the conversation. You’ve had the conversation in three books that preceded this. Now it is
time to have a friendship.