Roberta Grimes

Love and Fear

Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 16, 2025 • 4 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus, Thomas Jefferson

Love is but a song we sing!
Fear’s the way we die.
You can make the mountains ring,
Or make the angels cry.
Though the bird is on the wing,
And you may not know why,

Come on people now, smile on your brother!
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.

Some may come and some may go.
We will surely pass,
When the One that left us here
Returns for us at last.
We are but a moment’s sunlight,
Fading in the grass.

Come on people now, smile on your brother!
Everybody get together, try to love one another
Right now. Right now. Right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), from “Get Together” (1967)

There are times when my wish that I could  be a Christian again will unexpectedly overwhelm me with yearning. I have a sister and a cousin who are about my age. We three have been close all our lives, and now we text together when something happens that seems to one of us to be worth sharing. So naturally, when I held my big deer breakfast last Sunday morning, I texted to Lee and Paula a few pictures taken out my office bow window. My daughter had stopped at a Buc-ee’s on her way back from a drive down to Houston on that previous afternoon, and she had bought a big bag of deer-corn with which to entertain our local population. For people who don’t live in Texas, I should add that a Buc-ee’s is a highway-side world too gigantic to be called just a pit-stop, and it sells a lot of eccentric things, including bags of deer-corn. (The fact that those camouflage-colored bags of deer corn have big bull’s-eyes printed on one side of them is something that we can politely ignore.) So, there were a dozen deer in our yard that morning, ranging from bucks wearing half-grown antlers in velvet down to this year’s spotted fawns. All of them were just outside my office bow window, cheerily munching on their Sunday breakfast maybe six feet away but oblivious to me!

I texted a few deer pictures to Lee and Paula, but I didn’t hear back from them for almost an hour. Their tardiness excuse was that they each had just come home from church. One lives in Colorado now, while the other is still  in Massachusetts, and each has of course become a matriarch who dwells, as I do, immersed in the comings and goings of a grown daughter’s nearly-grown family. And, amazingly to me, they both find going to their local Protestant churches on Sundays to be a usual part of their love-filled lives. Now, though, I can too plainly see that horrifying religion for what it is: it’s a fear-based Roman trap that wears Jesus’s beautiful face as a mask while it uses its own dogmas to hold more than two billion people ensnared for life.

But what fills me with raw, inescapable yearning as I read their texts about having just attended their churches is, of course, the sweet New England church of my childhood, where I never heard a single fear-based word. I still receive that church’s weekly emails, to this day. But dear Reverend Turrell has long since transitioned, and that church itself is several days’ drive away from where I live now in Texas. And unlike my sister and my cousin, even though I have pledged my life to serving God, and now I know and I deeply love the genuine, still-living Jesus with everything that is in me, I find that I can no longer be a Christian. For a time, soon after we moved to Texas, I thought the Unity Church might be my answer, since it was down to just singing and studying A Course In Miracles and positive conversations about how to better live the teachings of Jesus. But more recently, Unity has begun to almost semi-deify its late-nineteenth-century founders, the Fillmores and some others, which is the very last thing that poor Charles and Myrtle ever would have wanted.

My problem is that I know far too much! I know that the religion that we call “Christianity” was begun in the year 312 C.E. by the Roman Emperor Constantine, after the Romans had spent the previous two centuries trying to destroy the whole Jesus Movement. Those first centuries of persecution had only served to make the Way of Jesus stronger, but then Constantine had suddenly made a shift and begun to follow Jesus himself, because he thought he had seen a vision of a cross in the clouds, and heard a voice that said, “By this sign you shall conquer.” Which hardly seems to be a great spiritual base on which to build a new religion!

What Jesus had given us was a set of spiritual teachings that He called “The Way”. His body had died on a cross at the end of His earthly life, true enough; but only so He could then miraculously raise it from the dead, and thereby prove to us all that our lives are eternal. Jesus’s Way was immediately powerful, and it grew steadily ever more powerful. It soon had millions of followers, all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away from its roots as Rome. But then, three hundred years after Jesus’s Resurrection and His Ascension, along came this Roman crazyman Emperor who needed a great fear-based way to unify and energize his armies So he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, and he directed them to create the first Christian Bible, and the fear-based doctrines of the Christine religion that is still being followed worldwide to this day. Christianity is not Jesus’s Way at all; but rather, it is Constantine’s Way.

How do I know all of this with such soul-wrenching certainty? Because Jesus, our beautiful eternal Wayshower and Best Friend Jesus, who came to us truly as God on earth, has personally told me His genuine Eternal Life’s Story. One night in 2022, and with no warning at all that this was about to happen, my Thomas took me to the astral plane to meet with Jesus, and together they allowed me to remember the event. Seriously! I look back at this whole life that I am living now, at my Experience of Light when I was eight years old; and then at discovering that my spirit guide is not a usual sort of spirit guide, but rather he was Thomas Jefferson in his most recent lifetime but one, and he has been what you might call Jesus’s close sidekick for the past two thousand years. You cannot make this up, and I am private by nature, so for sure I never would have chosen any of this! When I first began to put it together, and I started saying, “But, why me?” Thomas would cheekily retort, “Why not you?”

This is my Thomas’s first time working as anyone’s spirit guide, and as I think you can see, he is not yet great at the job (Sorry, Thomas). Everyone who is born on earth has a primary spirit guide for that whole lifetime, and the point of Thomas’s spirit guide role is supposed to be to guide me in raising my base spiritual vibration. So, our relationship should be all about me! But apparently, Thomas and I are very old and close friends, and my usual gender is male, so he treats me with more familiarity, and with much less gentle respect than is usual in the basic spirit guide relationship. And although I have no memory of any of this while I am in this body, I gather now that I also am part of Jesus’s eternal inner circle. So, Thomas and I came into this lifetime that is supposed to be all about ME. But we planned my life mostly around continuing to serve Jesus, as we have been doing ever since the Lord’s Ascension, two thousand years ago. Which, Thomas is now pointing out to me, has been a very effective way for him to help me to further raise my personal spiritual vibration, has it not? So, perhaps he hasn’t done such a poor job at his spirit guide role, after all, wouldn’t you say? And, shouldn’t I be admitting to that, now? Or, so he keeps saying to me. And he is right, of course. Well, in any event, that was the reason why he and Jesus gave me so little explanation of what was going on, when, one night in 2022, Thomas simply took me to meet with Jesus on the Lord’s astral riverbank. And Jesus, without ceremony, simply set about telling me His eternal-life’s Story.

Over time, we are preparing teachingsbyjesus.com at Jesus’s direction, and we eventually will be promoting it for Him. Thomas and I are absolutely not driving this train! And I have no idea about the timing, but I have the vague sense that Jesus is waiting for certain unguessable things to happen on earth before we will be given the word to complete and begin to promote His website. So it may be even decades from now. There is no time where Jesus is. What He told me about Himself in April of 2022 is meant just to be posted on that website, but He said these things to me as we sat together on that astral riverbank, and we fed His fish with grain that simply appeared in our hands beneath that odd astral sky streaked with colors that never are seen on earth. So, I know His truth now, and I cannot un-know it. I had been gradually growing away from Christianity over many years, even as I still loved the religion, because I had been seeing ever more clearly how different it is from the teachings of Jesus, and how based in fear it is, and not based in love, and how it really does not closely follow Jesus’s teachings at all. But I had gone to sleep that night not realizing that now would be my breaking point.

Jesus has a distinctive voice. He speaks softly and gently, and He has a mild, unguessable accent. He told me that He wanted to tell me His story, because it was time for the world to know His story, and He wanted me to tell it on His website. Which I told Him that of course I would do. Jesus lived His last earth-lifetime with the being that I call Thomas very long ago. My Thomas and I have come to reckon that the last earth-lifetime that Jesus ever lived as a usual human being was about six thousand years ago, when He was the middle brother of three princes in a walled city somewhere in the Middle East. His older brother then is now my Thomas, and His younger brother became the Apostle John. Those three long-ago princes died in their late teens and early twenties when their city was conquered by barbarians, and Jesus then rose to become a perfected Being at the Godhead level. And when He saw how unjust this whole system was, that people had to incarnate repeatedly because no one realized what actually was going on, He seems to have spent some four thousand earth-years petitioning God to allow Him to be reborn from out of the Godhead – something never before done, and also never done since – so He could teach humankind how to use the challenges of their earth-lives to grow spiritually, so then they never would have to be reborn on earth again. Well, wow. So Jesus really was once one of us! There was His purpose clearly stated for us, too: He was born from out of the Godhead so He could teach us how to grow spiritually, and it really had happened, just this way!

As He was telling me His story, Jesus had often to leave me briefly, to stand and go to greet and bless groups of newly-dead Christians, and then return and sit down again on His riverbank and return to feeding His fish and telling me His story. He would know when those groups were approaching us, even from a distance and without turning to look for them. And of course, He could read my mind as well, so I didn’t have to ask my most pressing questions. After we had talked about His life story through His teaching phase on earth, He said, “Little One, you wonder about My death on the cross, but you know these answers before I give them to you. My plan had been to give My disciples their charge, and to begin their teaching walk with them. Then one day, I would just walk away and ascend. But the problem was that, no matter what I said, I never could convince the people there is no death! They had all those bone-boxes. They thought they knew better than I did.”

He said those last words as He was standing, yet again. The custom of that time was to lay out the bodies of the newly dead in caves to rot away until only their bones remained. Then their bones would be gathered and placed in bone-boxes, called ossuaries, which would be labeled with each decedent’s name and then put in permanent storage. So, no wonder no one believed Jesus when He told them they were going to live forever! As Jesus sat down again beside me this time, He was saying that He had decided that His only option was to die a public death, a crucifixion, and then to resurrect His body. He had been practicing by resurrecting dead small animals, and that was working, although He couldn’t keep them alive for long. But once He was inside His resurrected corpse, He thought that He could keep it going for long enough to prove His point to the crowds. However, the advanced Beings who were His guidance team for His lifetime as Jesus absolutely forbade His letting Himself be crucified. For Him to debase a divine being to that extent? They refused to even consider allowing it! But Jesus said to me – and I will never forget the look on His face when He said this – that He was going to do it, no matter what they said. Which was why, on the cross, He briefly cried out to God with worry that God was not releasing Him from His body soon enough for Him to escape having the soldiers break His legs at sundown, so His body would die before the Sabbath began; since of course, broken legs would have rendered that body unable to walk once He resurrected it.

 We talked that night about what Jesus could read from my mind was my major concern, which was whether He had died as a sin-sacrifice. That dogma is Constantine’s core Christian teaching, and yet it makes no sense at all, for at least these two reasons:

• Jesus tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges anyone, so no sin-sacrifice ever was needed (See JN 5:22-23 and JN 12:47).
• If Jesus had died as a sin-sacrifice, then His rising from the dead would have made no sense, since the Temple sin-sacrifices always stayed dead; yet the explanation for Jesus”s rising that He gave to me, that He rose from the dead to prove to the crowds that our lives are eternal, makes perfect sense.

So from the moment when I woke up that next morning, and forever after, I can no longer bear Christianity. I cannot be inside a church. That religion is fear-based Roman lies! No, Jesus did not die as a sin-sacrifice, and to make the Roman instrument of torture that killed His body His symbol now is horrifying! Jesus’s symbol should be light and joy, the beauty and certainty of God’s perfect love. That is what I think, but what I think doesn’t matter. What does our Wayshower and Best Friend think…?

If you hear the song I sing,
You will understand (listen!)
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both.
It’s there at your command!

Come on people now, Smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, Try to love one another
Right now, Right now, Right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)