Lesson 172: Review: “God is but Love and therefore so am I.”  “In my defenselessness my safety lies.” “I am among the ministers of God.”

From the moment we wake up we are in conversation with God. 

God knows what we think and how we live because we share this intimacy with God intrinsically and also ideally.  This intimacy with God is like any great relationship and it is simply the place we learn to be better selves.

The Course reminds us that we are all perfect and whole and healed exactly as we are.  Therefore, we don’t have to do any thing to earn the love and trust of God or anyone else.   This is already ingrained in our connection.

God gives us the permission to live well because we are totally deserving of the optimal abundance emotionally and physically.  

This is great to hear because we need to change how we think a bit.

We are not used to being big.  We are not used to having such plenty. 

We are learning in the Course to become open to receiving the best there is.  This is an option. Why not take it?  The Course gives us the tools to do this.  God lays out the instruction here to land ourselves all the great stuff that we deserve.

The problem is that we don’t think we are worth the effort. 

The Course gives tons of help with learning in the workbook and text and the philosophy is pretty cool when you get into it more.  We learn that this is all really super.  But the problem is that we still feel badly enough about ourselves that we don’t make the time and effort to apply the Course.

This is a shame for us.  We are the ones who are not in the level of peace we could be if we were truly applying the Course.  This is only our problem.  No one else is offended if we are not up to making a clear commitment to doing the Course.

No one suffers but us.

This is why the Course goes to great lengths to simply get us to keep reading until it sinks in.  We may also have more problems in the world until we will feel stuck and then when we get desperate enough we start applying the Course because maybe nothing else is working.  This is ok if we want to do it that way.

The Course says everything gets used.

Therefore, our suffering sure has purpose when it makes us desperate enough we turn to putting the Course into action because we are at a loss for anything else to solve the problem.  This puts purpose into our suffering and we sure want to do this when we are really stuck.

Jesus has such compassion for us because He knows how much our egos resist applying the Course.  He says point blank in the Course that we can have tons of problems in the world to try to persuade us to take the Course’s teaching seriously.  We get bombarded with all kinds of dilemmas and we end up suffering over them incredibly.  The Course explains how this happens in order to prevent us from in fact getting to this place of true suffering.  Jesus says we don’t have to suffer.   That is our choice.

We can apply the Course instead and this experience of pain caused by the world’s happenings will be significantly reduced.

The Course says that we don’t want to wait until the axe falls to make the Course the solution. 

We rather get right down to it- we do it quickly in a way that allows us time and space to heal.

The Course works if you work it.  That means we must get to that place of feeling like we deserve to be happy and live in lightness.

This is the way to infuse stamina to our practice of applying the Course. 

We do it and create inertia as we make the effort to understand the principles, pray, and experience the Course’s wisdom in the form of application.