Lesson 323: “What is Creation?”  “I will gladly make the “sacrifice” of fear.”

The Course is inviting us here to rethink our relationship with sacrifice. 

The world says that our sacrifice is always a significant loss of something or someone we love and want to have more of. 

We learn from the world that our sacrifice always means we lose in some way.  This is the bottom line.  We get less and there is always some degree of lack and scarcity.  We learn from the world that our sacrifice occurs when the ego’s system of thinking is fully  functional.

We all fear sacrifice because we are used to the world’s refrain that plays that sacrifice is never wanted and always entails a degree of suffering at our unfortunate loss.

The Course is asking us to see more clearly how we define and experience sacrifice.  We are used to associating certain worldly things with typically known places of worldly lack.

But the Course reminds us that this is all an experience that always puts us in a position of feeling badly when we believe we will have to sacrifice something.

We can forget that sacrifice is not always something we want to deny and avoid. 

The Course reminds us that we can have the most  beautiful experience of what it feels like when we make our object of sacrifice actually fear.

We must take this dreaded sacrifice and we use the exact same idea of what the world is afraid of and we allow for instead a healed “sacrifice” to be applied to our fear. 

Entirely eradicating fear is such an appealing notion.  It feels so good because we are doing what God wants us to do and what makes us truly happy in our assigning fear to be what we refuse to entertain in any way.

When we give up fear we must be very clear about the choice.

When we are gripped in fear in an extreme way sometimes it is so overwhelming we lose our focus and willingness to remove the fear.  We can be virtually paralyzed.  Therefore, the Course reminds us to use this idea from the ego’s world that we try to avoid at all costs because we find it so shattering and rather apply it to something like fear.

We use it to make a firm choice to not allow fear within. 

We want to think about and be conscious of how awesome is the sacrificing fear and be willing to do it.  

We want to let God into the equation additionally.

God heals our previous notions of fearing sacrificing something by reminding us that sacrificing fear is actually something that would give us our happiest dream come true.

We just need to let God heal that reluctance we have to sacrificing. 

We must end our resistance to it and use it for what it was truly made for- helping us to get to God.