Lesson 197: “It can be but my gratitude I earn.”

This lesson says, “You turn to attack again, unless you find external gratitude and lavish thanks.” 

The problem is that the ego has a very specific idea of how things should look-  especially the minute details about how our gifts should be received. 

When we give from the ego perspective, we make out exactly how we want the other person to give us thanks.

We can be especially sensitive about this issue, because people generally spend a lot of time and energy on whatever they give, and may feel like they want to be acknowledged for the good they bring to others. 

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be acknowledged for the wonderful things we are doing.

We may just want to know that someone saw and understood what we made or in some way had a response about it. 

It is a lovely thing when we have relationships to figure out how we all operate, and what works best for each of us in terms of what kind of communication we want. 

That is not a problem, but what we want to do is hold this acknowledgement from others about what we have given with a very delicate hand.  

We want to not get all ego centered and attached to the nature of the response we get from the other people we may want to hear from.

This attachment about the way they say thank you always is stressful, and leads us down the road of attack energy.

When we get upset about how people give thanks, this is just the ego bearing down on us, with that heavy handed weight that sucks us down to that lower energy in which we don’t want to be.  

We must give our attachment about what our thanks should look like right to God’s altar. 

We are asked to surrender that ego push to get the response we want.  We also learn that we actually are joined with the other people with whom we share the earth, and we are all in the position of feeling each other.

That means that when the other person responds on some level that we also are lucky enough to feel this thanks too energetically. 

We just need to trust this is happening.

The Course says that there will be an inner thanks even if we don’t see it physically and we can trust that we will get the amazing feeling of that gratitude through our energy connection.

We are asked to just remember how lucky we are that we get all of God’s gifts.  Our task is to know how totally fortunate we are to get all of God’s love and certainty and all of God’s invulnerability, and so we can just sit in the wonder of how lucky we are to be who we are as God’s beloved children.

Whenever we give, we also receive, so when we express thanks in the world we also feel the benefit of this feeling and energy ourselves  This is why it is worth doing.