Lesson 48: “There is nothing to fear.”  

I love this lesson.  Totally succinct, gets right to the point.  The Course has this brilliant and eloquent way of getting right past any beating around the bush.  This is simply the honest truth.  There is nothing complicated about it.  There is nothing that makes us sit and wonder what it is really getting at.  It is all boiled down to these few words.  The Course more elaborately explains this in its 1300 pages but it can be summarized accurately with this simple message.

The Course is teaching us the

magic in keeping it simple. 

Our egos like to go on ad nauseous in answering any simple question.  Our egos like to make everything dramatic and extensive to answer questions to fill up space and time.  When we are filled with more ideas of our ego we lose our touch and alignment with God.  This is why we are getting this instruction from Jesus here how to keep all things simple.  When we keep it simple we stop getting confused in the answering.  Sometimes when we go on at length in answering, our egos get confused in the expression that seems more difficult to translate from our ego’s viewpoint.

The reason there is nothing to fear is because God always has a plan.  God always has an agenda that is superior to our ego’s attempt at getting us to the next juncture of our lives.  God is completely knowing.  He knows all past, future and present and He knows exactly what will serve the higher good of all people in the world.  This definitely includes us.  There could never be a way that we as the little self of our egos trying to sail our ship can account for the higher good of all people involved.  We don’t have this kind of insight.

This is why we are infinitely blessed that we have God as our number one fan and parent because God has all the information about how to make the

greater good

in all circumstances.  When we can trust that, then all of our suffering ends.

When we are anxious and living through our fear, we can never rest and be peaceful within.  Our lives will be plagued with consistent misery if we allow the ego to answer our questions about how to proceed.  God is perfect and has perfect answers.  Our task is to remember that God absolutely cares for our every wonder about what to do and where to go.  God is the sole one Who cares infinitely about whether we live in peace and feel light and certain in our lives.  The reason He does is because He has forever professed His undying love for us.  He has offered us all the favor we could ever ask for because God is just the One to erase any old fantasy we had of being fearful.  God cares for us so much that He can definitely erase any old hint of fear from our minds.  God cares that we have all the support we could ever hope for.

When we see sometimes that something happened that appears to look like something we may not want or we may fear it, we just have to have faith that this is a temporary challenge.  God may have us in the midst of our fear for some time.  This is part of life.  What we are learning to do is to forgive ourselves when our fear funs away from us.  This is ever so important.  Stay tuned into our own experience of fear and recognize that in the human condition sometimes we are simply exposed to situations where our fear comes up.

Also, we may need to

forgive God. 

If we get stuck and feel fearful and don’t know how to let this go, pray.  Ask God for guidance how to let go of the recurrence of this fear situation coming back.  If we don’t know how to forgive God sometimes we need to ask God for guidance.  If we get stuck, my experience is to just stay in prayer.  After a time with simply conversing with God, we will get to a higher vibration where we are not repeating our stint with fear.  The more conscious time we spend with God I find, the greater honesty that comes as well as a deep serenity that naturally flows between us and God.