The point is, you have not been damaged by others in your life who did what you wish they
had not done, or who didn’t do what you wish they had.
I tell you this—again: I have sent you nothing but angels. These people all brought you gifts,
wonderful gifts, designed to help you remember Who You Really Are. And you have done the
same for others. And when you all get through with this grand adventure, you will see that
clearly, and you will thank each other.
I tell you, the day will come when you will review your life and be thankful for every minute of
it. Every hurt, every sorrow, every joy, every celebration, every moment of your life will be a
treasure to you, for you will see the utter perfection of the design. You will stand back from
the weaving and see the tapestry, and you will weep at the beauty of it.
So love each other. Every other. All others. Even those you have called your persecutors.
Even those you have cursed as enemies.
Love each other, and love yourself. For God’s sake, love yourself. I mean that literally. Love
your Self, for God’s sake.
That has sometimes been very hard to do. Especially when I think about how I have been in
the past. I wasn’t a very nice person during most of my life. I spent thirty years, my twenties,
thirties, and forties, being an utter—
—Don’t say it. Don’t indict yourself that way. You were not the worst person who ever walked
the face of the Earth. You were not the devil incarnate. You were, and are, a human being,
making mistakes, trying to find your way back home. You were confused. You did what you
did because you were confused. You were lost. You were lost, and now you are found.
Do not lose yourself again, this time in the labyrinth of your own self-pity, in the maze of your
own guilt. Rather, call yourself forth, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever
you held about Who You Are.
Tell your story, yes, but do not be your story. Your story is like everyone’s life story. It is just
who you thought you were. It is not Who You Really Are. If you use it to remember Who You
Really Are, you will have used it wisely. You will have used it exactly as it was intended to be
used.
So tell your story, and let us see what else you have remembered as a result of it, and what
there is for all people to remember.
Well, maybe I wasn’t an utter—whatever... but I certainly wasn’t very good at making people
feel safe. Even in the early eighties, when I thought I’d learned a little about personal growth,
I wasn’t applying what I was learning.
I’d married again, left Terry Cole-Whittaker Ministries, and moved away from the hubbub of
San Diego, to the tiny town of Klickitat, Washington. But life didn’t work out very well there ei-
ther, largely because I was simply not very safe to be around. I was selfish, and manipulated
every moment and person that I could, in order to get what I wanted.
Not much changed when I moved to Portland, Oregon, hoping to get a fresh start. Instead of
improving, my life went from complicated to more complicated, the crushing blow being a
huge fire in the apartment house where I was living with my wife, destroying just about
everything we owned. But I hadn’t hit rock bottom yet. I blew my marriage apart, then formed
other relationships, and blew them apart. I was struggling like a drowning man trying to stay
afloat, nearly taking everyone around down with me.
By this time I knew that things couldn’t get worse. Except they did. An eighty-year-old man in
a Studebaker hit the car I was driving head-on, leaving me with a broken neck. I wound up in
a Philadelphia Collar for over a year, undergoing intensive physical therapy daily for months,
every other day for more months, finally dropping off to two visits a week, and then, at last, it
was over—but so was everything else in my life. I’d lost my earning power, lost my latest
relationship, and I walked outside one day to find that my car had been stolen.