Lesson 50: “I am sustained by the Love of God.”

This lesson says, “It is a declaration of release from your belief in idols.” 

The ego’s world is convincing.

We actually come to believe that all that we see in the world is going to bring us some amount of satisfaction and a fulfillment of our purpose. 

This is such a huge scam.  It doesn’t work.

And we just show up over and over to give credence to the thought and belief that the world has anything that will make us feel the Love we crave so dearly. 

We do ourselves a real disservice when we sit and believe the world’s reality.

The problem is not simply that we see the world as real, but it is also that we give the world a power that appears to bring us to a point of senselessly craving the world’s offering. 

This is our only problem- the way we give the world way more power than it has. 

We go to the extent of giving it the power to disrupt our days when we don’t get as much of whatever we want.  We allow the world’s things to pull us drastically.

We can’t help but stop everything and run to make sure we get more of the attractive draw we think we can’t have enough of.  The world is always playing tricks on us because it seems such a lure.

We don’t know when to stop or how to stop either.

We get stuck in addictive thinking and behavior because we have a huge draw to do this when we see the world’s stuff.

The Course reminds us that we don’t have to make the world’s things our precious idols.

We can show up and experience the world while we can have gratitude for it without getting into the grip that paralyzes us- where we have zero resistance over how much we try to get to the thing that draws us.

Just know that it is perfectly possible to be very drawn to the world and have desire for the world’s attractions, but also respect and love all the rest of what is in our lives just as much. 

We just need to make space for the increasing of all of our love for all the other things except for the idol. 

Then we will get to balance with practice.

The problem with the idols we are attracted to in the world is that we end up getting out of balance in our self-respect and respect for the things we are idolizing.  

We are learning to take a step back and breathe before we plunge ahead to get back to gripping that idol.

We just sit in a moment of serenity and we ask God to teach us how to respect our own purpose which is also the Will of God. 

And the Will of God is that we have appropriate relationships with all other things and ourselves. 

We  are learning to respect all involved, and as we do, our relationships with all the idols become totally transformed.

They become perfect and healthy because we let God into the equation in serenity and we also use our own self-respect as a model for how to disengage with the idols of the world in way that is totally helpful for us.