Lesson 176: Review: “God is but Love and therefore so am I.”  “Give me your blessing, Holy Son of God.”  “I am as God created me.”

It says in Lesson 161: “Yet bodies are but symbols for a concrete form of fear.”

We learn in the Course that our bodies are perfectly helpful tools to use as we live in the world’s illusion. 

The Course says that our bodies are not real and that the world is also unreal.  Therefore, we need to take the world with a new frame of reference.  The world is never going to be God’s kingdom because it is unreal.  Further, God is only in the Presence of perfection which never fails to be beautiful and everlasting and real.  The Course teaches us how to live amidst the illusion with non attachment.  This is always difficult for sure because the ego thrives on attachment.

The ego makes attachment its prime objective. 

We often just go along for the ride because we don’t know how to halt the ferris wheel in our minds and get out.  The world is an illusion and in no way is God’s so our job is to appreciate that our existence is now in time but time is not real.  That just gives us fuel to change our thinking so we simply undo some of our attachment.  Hard to be attached to the world when it is not real.  That is like playing long jump with no gravity.  You never land.  It just doesn’t work because it can’t.

The Course invites us to lay down our old perspective that the world and bodies matter.  We are simply learning to allow the body to be useful.

God’s purpose is to bring Love to the masses.  This is our task for sure because we are qualified to do exactly that. 

The body then is part of what establishes us able to carry out this function. 

We use our bodies to do God’s will.  This can mean we volunteer to feed the starving children.

This may mean we do nothing but sit with God in our minds and bring Love.  We can choose an activity that people might designate as truly helpful to the world like feeding the hungry.  But if we are not called by God to do this, we can do something else.

A perfectly legitimate way to serve the world is to simply do all we are doing with Love. 

If we are a lawyer, we can show up and make every case a way to express God’s Love.  If we are in the military, we can show up to the drill sergeant with a mind of Love and do our push ups with gusto.  The Course says let all interactions be the way we bring a miracle if there is a situation lacking love.

We find a way to make all parts of our lives an demonstration of God’s Will.

Our task is to appreciate our bodies and love them.  We want to forgive them too.  Part of how we live peace with a body is recognize we have a whole array of unhealthy habits.  We often forget certain ways of taking care of our bodies or maybe we never learned in the first place.

The Course says appreciate that our bodies need to be cared for so there is no impediment in God’s Plan where we use our bodies to meet with God in whatever way God wants.

We want to do all we need to play whatever role God has selected for us in the realization of our salvation.  

We are learning to forgive our bodies when we find aspects that don’t meet up with the standard our egos’ have set for them.

We must clear our minds of judgment in our pursuing perfection that the ego drives us to do and let go any false pressure of being physically any particular style.

Let it all be designed by God. 

Forgive those moments when we forget to love our bodies as they are.   Let forgiveness allow us to clear our minds so we are available to be present in God’s purpose.