I Appeal to You
... through Bertha Dudde  - 01.07.1958 

7157   Suffering as means of purifying the soul or love ....

Whatever contributes towards the soul’s maturity will often be experienced by you as a burden or hardship, for it is frequently the means of assisting the purification of the soul in order to make it wholesome and receptive to light. Nevertheless, an exceedingly effective means exists which is less painful for you humans: Acts of selfless neighbourly love .... Then the soul will mature very quickly, it will constantly acquire more strength and will reform and change its nature through love. However, for the most part you humans lack love, you still harbour much selfish love, you have not yet become completely unselfish in your thinking and actions, and therefore the soul’s purification needs to proceed by other means, such as suffering and illness, worries and adversities, which will then burden you and demand all your faith in order for you to free yourselves of them again. For in profound faith you would be able to entrust all your problems and sufferings to Me, you would be able to hand them over to Me and subsequently also be certain that I will take them from you. But this profound faith is, again, only the result of love .... And thus it will always remain a matter of greatest priority, love cannot be excluded; love is the correct and most certain means of freeing yourselves from illness and suffering, from all kinds of worries .... Yet, on the other hand, you don’t realise what blessings arise for the soul if you humans also patiently take all burdens upon yourselves, if you humbly endure everything for the sake of your soul’s maturing .... For no soul is already so mature that it, on passing away, will be of such crystal clarity that My light of love would be able to permeate it without obstruction ....

Blemishes more or less still cling to every soul, and the more of them it can discard on earth the happier it will be on entering the kingdom of the beyond and thank Me, its God and Father, for the time of trial on earth, regardless of how difficult it had been. And every day in earthly life is, after all, only an opportunity for testing, every day is a possibility for the soul to gather spiritual riches, and every day passes by and the length of time until its passing away from earth is getting ever shorter .... It won’t last forever, but the state of the soul, if it is imperfect, can last eternally .... And if you humans would only ever consider the suffering you have to endure as a means for purification, as the condition for a cleansing of your soul from all weaknesses and flaws still adhering to it, you would truly bless the suffering and be glad of it, because it will result in your spiritual progress and one day you will also realise why it was necessary during your earthly existence. You should learn to look at every day as a step on the ladder to perfection .... but you will also have to climb it in order to reach the goal. One day you will realise how useless those days were when you didn’t have to endure anything .... unless you spent them by being lovingly active .... Then the measure of suffering will also diminish, and there would truly not be so much hardship and misery in the world if people practised love, if they made an effort to carry out selfless works of love and thereby improved the maturity of soul in the most natural way. But if you have to suffer then be grateful for it and, despite everything, strive to shape your nature into love, for your life on earth is only short yet it is decisive for the whole of eternity.

Amen