As a child, Meg confesses, she was very manipulative and selfish and was used to getting her own way. She says, however, that life’s events and her own efforts and personal growth have helped her greatly overcome these tendencies. Her experiences as a wife and a mother have proven to be extremely helpful in enabling her to become a better person. In fact, it was with Meg’s daughter, Amy, that Meg got to face her own selfishness and the way she used to manipulate others head-on.
Meg tells how Amy, as a child and teenager, was very strong willed and had difficulty getting along with other members of the family. Amy’s problems and personal frustrations caused her to leave home early and then to suddenly get married at the age of eighteen. The marriage was short-lived, and Amy soon separated and divorced. It was not long before she married and divorced twice again. Extremely unhappy and finding herself with two young children of her own, Amy expressed her firm belief that her parents had been the cause of all of her problems. In her anger and unhappiness, she found occasion to tell Meg and her husband that she couldn’t possibly love either one of them because of how they had raised her.
In spite of all the difficulties they faced with Amy’s anger, Meg was convinced that the experience was a purposeful one and that she and her husband needed to continue to be supportive of their daughter. In the face of a relationship fraught with challenges, Meg set aside her own feelings and tried to reach out to the girl. Even when Amy caused the couple emotional strife, Meg never failed to express her love, keeping in touch with Amy, visiting as often as she could, and helping out financially when it was absolutely necessary. Meg began to believe that the best approach to the situation was simply “love expressed.” In time, her perseverance paid off. Amy began to change and started to take responsibility for her life. Amy even put herself through school and, according to Meg, today is a registered nurse, a loving mother of two children, and “a very caring person . . . who expresses her love for both of us.”
In retrospect, Meg realizes that it wasn’t only Amy who helped her to become a more loving and caring person. Since Meg herself was a wife and mother of four children, having to focus on others became a normal part of everyday life for her. In addition to the regular challenges of raising a family, there seemed to be a number of health obstacles that the family had to overcome. Those challenges included a son who had meningitis at the age of two. Another son suffered an accidental gunshot wound to his Achilles tendon at the age of twelve and took more than a year to heal. Their daughter contracted mononucleosis in high school. Also, Meg and her husband were seriously injured in an automobile accident—an event that took them years to completely overcome.
But perhaps the most trying and challenging experiences of her life happened almost thirty years ago, when her husband became interested in another woman. It seems that, early in their marriage, the couple had difficulties communicating and, by their sixteenth anniversary, they had drifted apart. The breakdown in their relationship prompted Meg’s husband to become interested in another woman. When Meg discovered what was happening, she confronted him. The couple spent a great deal of time discussing the situation. Meg told him that he had to make a clear-cut choice between his marriage and the other woman. Her husband professed his love for Meg and was adamant that he did not want the marriage to end. The couple worked through the situation, the marriage survived, and Meg says that their relationship is stronger today than ever before. In summing up that experience, Meg believes she was ultimately able to turn it into something helpful:
I learned that I, too, was at fault in the relationship and must work at being less selfish and more thoughtful of him and his needs. I try to acknowledge him more for the good he does and the good choices he makes. I also learned that I could forgive him for something that I did not think was possible before that time.
Throughout her life, rather than becoming angry at the challenges life has presented her, Meg has simply tried to see life’s events as an unfolding learning process. When a neighbor commented that it appeared as if Meg’s family was prone to bad luck, Meg was truly surprised:
I had never even considered anything that had happened as anything except part of life that we all must experience and learn from. We felt the Lord’s presence through all that happened and the strength of loving, helpful friends. We always looked ahead, did what was necessary at the time and never looked back. Our children have developed the same attitudes and do not complain or feel victims of circumstance.
When asked to name a soul strength that wasn’t learned through life’s events but rather seemed to be a part of who she was from the very beginning, Meg states unequivocally that it has to do with working with children. Almost from the time she was born, she remembers an incredibly strong desire to have baby brothers and sisters. She frequently begged her mother to have another child. By the time she was four, whenever she came in contact with a woman who had a baby, Meg would plead to hold the child and play with it. As she grew up, she looked forward to having a large family of her own and found many occasions as a teenager to baby-sit. Her college path included a degree in child psychology and early childhood education. She taught kindergarten and the primary grades for more than thirty years before retiring and now does substitute teaching. As a grandparent, she loves being with her grandchildren. Her lifelong love of young people has convinced Meg beyond any doubt “that I was supposed to work with children.”
From the perspective of the Edgar Cayce readings, all of our relationships with one another are the means by which the soul encounters lessons to be learned in the present as well as failures from the past that need to be overcome. For that reason, our relationships are an ongoing process that the soul picks up exactly where they have been left off. The case history of Franklin Wagner; his wife, Julia; and their daughter, Debbie, provides a unique and interesting portrayal of a family relationship brought back together.
When the family came to Edgar Cayce for help, the couple was troubled by the condition of their twelve-year-old daughter, who was prone to epileptic seizures. As a last resort, friends had referred them for a reading. Apparently, much of their time together had been spent in trying to find help for Debbie; her condition was the cause of much concern for the family. Cayce was able to give them the help that they sought. In addition to providing a series of physical readings that outlined treatment for their daughter’s illness, the girl’s condition was traced to an early American incarnation when she had once misused her body and her talent for intuition. Cayce told the couple that the three had been brought back together in an attempt to overcome this period of soul regression because each had been responsible for what had transpired. In the language of the readings the result was that “each soul must meet its own self.” (2345-1) Here’s how the information from the readings explained the past-life basis for the present-day situation:
During the period of the American Revolution, Franklin and Julia were married, just as they were in the present. As now, Debbie was their daughter. At the time, the couple believed in and worked for the British cause. Their support of the Crown knew no bounds, and the couple convinced their grown daughter to spy for them. Apparently, the girl was quite attractive, and the best means of procuring the information they desired was Debbie herself. Debbie set out to inflame the passions of those men who could supply her with information that could be used against the colonies. Apparently, the Wagners forced their daughter into a life of prostitution, breaking the girl’s morals and ideals in the process. Debbie’s acute sense of intuition also had been used for the couple’s benefit.
In the present, the three had been brought back together as a means of correcting what they had once done wrong. Much of that correction had been made by Debbie’s parents now placing their daughter’s needs before their own.
It’s important to point out that it wasn’t necessarily the deed of prostitution that led to Debbie’s illness in the present; instead,