Lesson 98: “I will accept my part in God’s plan for salvation.”

The Course reminds us here that God has a perfect plan for salvation and that plan is that we be saved in this moment.  Many religions and people believe that salvation is in the afterlife. Therefore, they believe that in the world we are essentially in limbo because we can’t ever get to such an amazing state of salvation until we die.

Therefore, our life on the earth in this moment seems quite bleak. 

When we have no reason to live now accept to rack up points in God’s “good person list,” then there is no purpose now because when we are then hoping for salvation in the afterlife.  Also, mostly we try to curtail our behavior here so we don’t do anything that God would consider “wrong”.

This is surely a depressing fact that we have no real cause for being in the world now if we are just biding our time until we can die and find a better way then.

This totally impacts the way we live in the world now if we are essentially disappointed to be here now because those people say that we can’t have access to God or what God gives us in the way of salvation until we leave this life.  And the problem with this is that know one knows for sure if there is any kind of afterlife or reincarnation.  This is all up in the air and to be decided by each individual here.  This means we have no sure bet if we follow this kind of common religious way of interpreting God that it is true and we question what is meant to be our salvation.  We will always be sad about this if we believe it because we can’t get to God now.  Or we may not get salvation in the end when we finally die because whatever saint that is tallying our good deed list may miscalculate and we could miss God entirely.  This is the worst way to live.

The Course says that our salvation is in the moment now.  Therefore, we don’t have to wait until our demise to get to the favored place of living in our salvation.  This means we can be active now and we can get the feeling of God’s salvation now because God has explained in the Course that our salvation is a little different.

We are all guaranteed our salvation.

We don’t have to wait in the wings to try to rush up to God and convince Him that we are worthy.  We don’t have to be anxious that this will never happen in our favor.  God says in the Course that we are worthy now, in this moment.

There is no other moment so in makes perfect sense that we are not putting all of our hopes into the future.

The future comes, but always in the shape of the now, moment by moment. 

That’s why we want to have our salvation now because this is the only time anyway.

We may die in some time but this is not important.  Our bodies are not real so our death is simply part of the process of life.  We don’t have to obsess over this.  We don’t have to do anything but just be grateful for every stage of life and trust that God will give us the comfort of being totally loved and perfectly saved now and always.  Because the body is not real the Course wants us to not get overly invested in trying to meet God in the afterlife.  That will happen surely but what matters is that we live in the moment now and in the now we have our salvation.

God reminds us that our salvation means that we are the most loved and cherished of children- for all of us- because we are totally innocent.

And our salvation springs from that inherent innocence because that is what makes us worthy of being saved. 

God says we are always worthy of being saved, now and always.  We are worthy because God says so.  We just have to appreciate this identity of being worthy and embody it because it is the truth.

The Course reminds us that our part in salvation is to show up and be loved.  We don’t have to do anything to deem ourselves worthy because that is already done.  Therefore we can simply sit and enjoy it.  When we remember our own worth, we also resonate that energy and all others- in seeing our example and feeling our feeling- also get the reminder that they are all equally worthy as well.

This is the gift we give in the process of salvation, we simply acknowledge that it is done already. 

Then others share in this knowing because they feel it too.