"Our Veteran Angel and our Apprentice Angel were flying around
and the apprentice was learning pretty fast. After all these
years he finally got a few things. So they were flying around and
they saw a man down there, and they both went on down and they gave
him an exercise. The Apprentice Angel and the Veteran Angel said to
this man, 'Now we're going to give you something to do that's going
to teach you a very good lesson - I'm talking about you attaining
goodness, and we'll tell you how.
The angel said, 'Now here's what I want you to do. There's a lake
over there, enormous lake with impure water in it and I want you to
go four times a week and take a little glass of water and pour the
glass of pure water into that impure lake, put it in it. And perhaps
in time it will become pure and then it will be a nice lake, it
won't be polluted any more.
And the man thought about it. It's an awfully big lake and he's
going to just put four glasses of water in it a week. But he
obeyed orders, he went down every week, put the glass of water
in. It didn't change the lake, but hang on now. And he got to
wondering about it and said, 'What good am I doing?' But the
angel said, 'Keep it up until you understand. Keep up doing what
you are told to do, you keep up with that lesson until you under-
stand what we're talking about.'
He kept it up, kept up, the lake still didn't change. One little
glass of water four times a week didn't do much to purify it.
Finally, he understood what you have to understand, which is this.
Your happiness is in obedience to what you're told to do, not in
the results of your goodness."
The Freedom of Being Good
Something Higher Than Ideas - MP3 CD, track 13
(originally sent 03/23/2016)