MHR_EP_2547 Heavenly Equity vs Free Will

What is the ONLY way we can limit God? In this episode we first review “Heavenly Equity; the collection of heavenly resources , actions, and interventions needed to affect a change in your life” We review a couple cases where we can see the steps used to bring forth the change. And then witness how all of that comes to an end, because, “The only way we limit God, no matter how much he wants to shower us with blessings and miracles, is when we limit him with our Free Will”.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

What is the only way we can limit God?

SPEAKER_00 0:06

What if I told you that there's more to it, that there are benefits and resources from heaven that are available to help you in this life, and you've never heard of them? Are you curious? Well, join Gordon Merrill as he digs deeper into making heaven real in this life.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

If you've been following along with some of the recent episodes on Making Heaven real, you will realize that we have stated from the very beginning that one of the things that we're going to be very strongly emphasizing and discussing is that we do not discuss any topic without pointing out if certain criteria, dogma, or beliefs in any way try to limit God. So given the fact that we've been doing that for the last several episodes here on Making Heaven Real, why lead off with the question, what is the only way we can limit God? I think by the end of the episode you'll have that figured out. But I think what we need to do in order to lay the groundwork for that is we need to pick up where we left off at the end of last week's episode, which was heavenly equity. That's a term I kind of coined myself over the last 20 months after my wife passed, when I'm sitting there watching things that are going on and things that are happening where heaven is making obvious changes, having obvious influence, and making things happen in ways that are pretty much indescribable normally in human terms. Last episode I defined heavenly equity as the collection of heavenly resources, actions, and interventions engaged to effect a change in our life. I'll kind of go through the first one and not say a whole lot about it. Take a quick break in the middle of that and go back and emphasize where things were obvious, where heavenly equity happened. And then I'll give you the second example quickly and have you listen after knowing what we have discussed about the first one, and see what you can point out in that story yourself about heavenly equity in that case. I think the first very dramatic example is when I met my wife. It was during summertime. It was at a summer camp, and we were both medical personnel for that camp. What's different about this situation is normally me and my ex-wife would work as medical staff on this at this summer camp. In this particular case, there was a need that came up in the middle of the summer where one of the staff members that was supposed to be a part of the medical staff was not able to be there. Now, the way this worked is a lot of times there would be brand new people with medical training who had never worked at the camp, who would be paired with personnel who had worked there previous summers and knew how things operated at that camp. In this particular case, I received a phone call from the camp director letting me know that in about two weeks, which was about week eight of this particular camp season, the more experienced medical staff member suddenly was ill and had to go to the hospital. As a result, the only person scheduled to be a medical staff for that camp for that week was a brand new person who had never been there. Considering, for the most part, for several years, myself and my ex-wife had been heading up the medical teams and had been responsible for some of the training for the medical teams. We were the first ones he called in order to try and find somebody, one of the two of us, to be the experienced medical team member to work with the new unexperienced team member. Several things about that. Number one turns out that my ex-wife was without any vacation time, so was not able to take any time off in order to be there for that particular week. Which left it up to me to consider the possibility of working that week as the experienced medical personnel. In order to do that, several things had to happen. Number one, if I was going to come take care of that medical staff assignment for that week, and the ex-wife didn't have any vacation time, that meant my kids were going to have to go to camp that week, which meant the director was going to have to spend some money. Considering the director at the time was the kind of person that would make every penny paid squeal as it was paid, kind of expected when I laid that out as a condition of helping him with that week to have him say no. So for me to go meant that the director was going to have to spend money. And the other part of that was I was going to have to leave early on Friday night instead of Saturday morning because I had to be back to work at Saturday. Strangely enough, without even taking a breath or a second thought, the director agreed and said yes. So looking back on it real quickly here, we have a staff member who was planning to be there, who all of a sudden could not be there for a medical reason. We had a need for an experienced person. The ex was for some reason out of vacation time. The director needed to spend money, which he hardly ever did, and he needed to work around me having to leave early. And all of that was accepted immediately. What also wasn't known in the background was I at the time was going through a pretty bad divorce. The person who was brand new on the medical team for that week also was going through a bad divorce. And both of us came to camp pretty much with the idea in mind that as bad as our marriages were, we were never, ever, ever, ever going to look at another person for another marriage. Later looking back at it, we also agreed that if we had not been in a situation where we had to be put to a job where we had to be around each other for a week, we probably would have never given each other a second glance. Now, if you want to really make that a little more interesting, our scenarios before we showed up at camp with our previous marriages and our previous ex-partners were very close to identical. Just change the gender and give it to the other person, and it was almost identical. So when we're sitting there around the table talking about how things need to work at the camp, and also interjecting a few things along the way about who are you, where are you from, how are you, you know, how are things going with you, what kind of job do you do, you know, all this kind of stuff. Always come down to reverting back to some discussion about home life. Quite honestly, she's told me several times she thought I was just piling on because I was coming up with situations in my life and in my previous marriage that were almost exactly identical to hers. Until Thursday of that week, my ex decided that she needed to make a trip out to camp. Supposedly there was a problem with the car and it was making a strange noise, and she wasn't sure what was going on with the car and if it was safe, and so she decided she needed to come to camp to have me listen to the noise on the car. Interestingly enough, it's about sixty miles one way. So if you're sure not sure the car is safe, why would you make a sixty mile one way trip? Don't think that was exactly the reason for showing up. However, when she showed up and when my late wife was able to see firsthand how she acted around me and a little bit about this the character of this person. She told me later my stories didn't do it justice. She also told me that if it hadn't been for that visit, she probably wouldn't have had second thoughts about meeting up with me after camp dating or carrying this anywhere further. So several things had to happen in order to even get us together. Even then, for the first four days of the week, still some doubt left in her mind because she wasn't sure that this was for real until this strange visit on Thursday solidified the thoughts and the intent. Now looking back on it, my question is I seriously hope that whatever happened that the staff member had to go to the hospital was not anything major. Wasn't anything life-threatening, especially if that was a situation solely where heavenly equity was put in place in order to make sure that the two of us got together. But this is where I'm talking about heavenly equity. This is where I'm pointing out that things that had to happen in the background to make this happen. The staff member had to go to the hospital, the director had a need, the ex no longer had vacation time, since that would have been the first choice to fill that position. The director had to spend money by making space for three kids and camp that week for me to be there. And the director and his wife had to cover and accommodate me having to leave a day early. And all of that was accepted and approved to get us together. Even then, it probably wouldn't have gone over the finish line without forcing an unexplained, unreasonable visit on Thursday to complete the picture. You know, one of the things I hear a lot, especially in religious circles, is, you know, when I was growing up, things were well, you know, God's answers are yes, no, or not right now. And I think that's way too simplistic, especially when you stop and look at the heavenly equity side of things. Obviously, the preparation to meet for us to meet each other was great. In other words, staff member number two, which was to be my wife, somewhere months in advance, had to decide that, hmm, maybe I want to do this this summer, and maybe I want to use this as a way for my kids to go to camp. Considering the training, initial orientation and training day for the medical staff for the summer was in early May. The decision was probably made who all was going to be on what teams and what week back in March. And the week we showed up was late July. So just sitting there saying, okay, well, if I'm going to pray for something, it's gonna go God's gonna either say yes or no or whatever. We don't know how long and how much is in the background working on this, even before we ask, sometimes. How this gets into our prayer life and how we handle things like this in prayer, I think we're going to put off until the next session and and the next episode. But these two are very compatible and go hand in hand. But the other side of this is if all of this effort is put in place and we have all of these things that are taken care of using all the heavenly resources and the actions and interventions in order to make sure that we got together that summer. Can you relate that to yourself as well now that you're going through grief? What all is going on in the background? What is heaven doing in the background? To support you, to hold you up in love, to make you feel the hug of love from God when you're at your lowest? If you understand all of the things that are in the background, or start to understand, or wrap your head around everything that's involved in heavenly equity for you, it helps you understand a little bit more how much support you have from heaven, even if you don't know it at the time. Okay, so after we've looked at this example number one, let me pivot to example number two. Again, I'm gonna withhold the names and some of the places and all that kind of stuff in order trying to protect the people involved and make sure this is all just about a story that happened to me more than anything else. I personally went through grief counseling both in a group level and at a personal level. I think I mentioned in a previous episode that my company I worked for at the time refused to let me go back to work until I could prove that I had an appointment with a grief counselor. This particular grief counselor was very good, was pretty much open to anything that was going on in my life in order to relate that to how I was dealing with grief. She also understood the relay of the information from her through the medium. Because I think I mentioned in a previous episode that because of that, she was amazed at how well I was progressing through the stages of grief, because now that I knew what happened, I was no longer angry, I was no longer mad at anybody. I wasn't really depressed because she's better off now. So, because of all that, she was open to adding that into her perception of where I was and the progress I was making with grief. As a part of that, it was only, you know, four, five, six months into it that she was telling me that I needed to start getting out into groups. She even tried to talk me into using a dating service, which I did not go for for several reasons. But then she was telling me one day, she goes, you know, you really need to get out around other people, and it would really be beneficial to you if you were able to find someone who had a recent loss that you could talk to. Okay. I could probably talk to somebody, but from the standpoint of looking for somebody else or trying to get into a dating situation, I'm not ready. No way, not gonna happen. So this particular week, I had some regular prescriptions I got from the drugstore, and I would go to the drugstore Wednesday morning and get all the prescriptions that were available that week on Wednesdays, just because it was an easier day for me at work and easier for me to do that. This particular week I went to the drugstore on Wednesday morning and everything was back ordered, and I needed to come back at another time. The next available time I could find on my work schedule was Thursday. And Thursday evening was also my regular weekly session with my grief counselor, and this is where she was emphasizing once again that you really need to talk to someone who has had a loss and have somebody that you can bounce ideas off of and talk to because you know there was not much of anybody else available to me in this particular situation where I was, and that's where I was like. Like, well, I'll talk to somebody and we'll talk, but I'm not interested in anybody. I'm not ready for anything. There's no way. So hang up from talking to my grief counselor, get in the car, go to the pharmacy, and I pull up to the drive-thru window. You have to picture this because this is kind of hard to catch a hold of. But when you come up to this particular pharmacy, you had to make a hard left turn to the window, which was right there. So as you're making this hard left turn, the front of the vehicle is normally not seen from the window. But the first thing out of her mouth is, hmm. With that grill guard that you've got on the front of your truck, you should just push the guy in front of you out of the way so that you wouldn't have to wait so long. Okay. What's interesting is the grill guard was specifically requested and picked out by my wife. It was her truck, it was her grill guard. That's exactly what she wanted. But she called it a deer pusher. The person in the window commenting on the grill guard told me I should have just taken the deer pusher and pushed the person in front of me out of the way. Not real sure why. That was a concern. But as we started talking about the medications and a few other things, it finally came out that she mentioned that she had just lost her mom. Interesting. I lost my wife. So this kind of quickly progresses to a well, you know, we need to get together some time and talk. Okay. She immediately tells me where she works, and she works Monday through Friday, and she goes to lunch at noon. Okay. So as I'm pulling away from the window, I have already at this point in time started talking to and hearing from my wife. And I've kind of got this thing in my head where I kind of look up into the one o'clock position from my orientation. And I just kind of look up and start talking to her. So as I'm pulling her away from the window, I was like, all right, what are you up to? And I can I can hear her laughing at me. Not only did she call the grill guard the deer pusher, she told me to push the guy out of the way so I could have got up there sooner. When I went back and looked at the receipt on the prescriptions, it was four minutes later than the time that my wife passed. Exactly seven months to the day previous. So if theoretically I'd pushed the guy out of the way, I may have been there at exactly the same time. I'm leaving and I'm going. I don't know what you're up to, but you know I'm not ready for any of this. And I literally hear her in my ear say, We'll see about that. The next day, getting close to lunchtime, I keep hearing her say go to lunch. And I'm going, There's no way this woman who's never met me before is going to come out of her work and get in the truck of a complete stranger and go to lunch. I was pretty much hoping she was more safety conscious than that, but she kept telling me all morning, go to lunch, go to lunch, go to lunch. I showed up out in front of her work when she came out at noon, she looked up, smiled, came over, got in the car, and we went to lunch and had a great time. Now, I say all this to say how things worked so fast. And when I'm saying fast, you gotta understand this is lightning speed. She called it her twilight zone because of how fast things were moving. We had that first date that was wonderful. The next Sunday we went on a date to a state park that she liked and had a picnic lunch, and I found out later she had never been invited on a picnic before. Hmm, I wonder where that idea came from. Within 48 hours, she invited me to meet her and her daughters at a local store. And everything progressed from there, not just in a relationship way, but in deep discussion. The picnic at the state park was for seven hours of talking. We had so many things in common. Had so many beliefs that were shared, had so many things that were just pivot points that we just completely agreed on. Even to the point where I had even asked her how she felt about a podcast just like this. Watching God work, watching heaven make changes and manipulate things in lightning speed simply because I was already about to leave town. Within five months of meeting her, we were engaged, had a gay engagement party, had a wonderful mountain resort that she loves, had the whole family there, and had a wonderful time. Okay. Here's the heavenly equity. Here's where I literally sat in amazement and watched as things fell together, fell in place, just rhythmically, in order to progress this maturely in five months. Okay. So now, here's where we get back to the original question. And here's a statement you may want to write down. The only way we can limit God, no matter how much he wants to shower us with blessings and miracles, is when we limit Him with our free will. So to keep from leaving you hanging, the previous story was real. It happened to me. But it also fell apart quickly when she exercised her free will to turn her back on that. All of God's heavenly equity, all of God's miracles, all of the things that were done in order to make this come together suddenly came to a complete stop because God will never ever override your free will. There's nothing else that can limit God. God has all power, God has all knowing, God has this wonderful plan for you in every way. That plan can be executed by God using the heavenly equity until you get in the way. The only way God can be limited is when you use your free will.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

We hope you learned something new about God's love and his resources during our time together. Please like and subscribe so you don't miss out. You can find our social media links and our contact info in the show notes. When you're commenting, please reference the episode. Join us next time as we begin turn out the way of making heaven real in this life with Golden River.