Lesson 42: “God is my strength. Vision is His gift.”
The Course teaches us about our steadfast, consistent love and connection from God. Jesus teaches us that God is always powerful and always available to satisfy any and all of our wants and needs. The Course says that our task is to redefine what and Who we think God is. Often we gleaned from the world that God is actually the nightmare. We hear that God is out to punish us. The Course says that God is always benevolent and always plans and carries out the reality in our human experience that will be most beneficial to us. Therefore we can let go of our fear of God. How in the world can we trust God if we think that God is eager to lash us with whips because we have done something that appears less than perfect? When we harbor this belief that God will slash us with His sword whenever we lose our guard, then we have the most challenging time trusting God.
The Course says that God is always trustworthy and God always looks out for our higher good. This is contrary thinking than we often learned earlier in our lives. We need to look at this view of God again and stop to shake it at its roots. This view of God is completely false. This means that this information will always steer us wrong. When we can’t trust God then we will always be second guessing what is happening. When we don’t trust God then our lives turn into a big story filled with judgement. This judgement comes from our difficulty finding a way to have faith in God’s plan. When we don’t have faith, then everything will be a vision of attack because we will be judging it all; this is simply attack beginning its cycle when we turn to judgment.
God is actually our number one ally.
When we believe in a punishing God, this view of our union as allies is impossible to buy. We need to stop rebelling against God. When we feel like God is in some way committed to destroying our certainty then we feel terrible. We lose our memory of peace when we can’t remember our ally-based-relationship with God.
The Course teaches us that God is all good and always benevolent. God teaches us what the true nature of friendship is. When we realize that God is the best ally and friend we could have, then we also get glimpses of God’s perfect love. In the example God sets for us in the Course where God is loving to the nth degree then we start to see how wonderful can be the experience of trust and faith in our most cherished allies. We start to understand that our relationship with God as we learn in the Course is a perfect example of how to love ourselves as well as love other people.
When we see that God is wholly loving, then we can understand that God is available to support us in every way. We need to stop resisting this union with God. Lots of us reject the union of our demonstrated love with God because we have different blocks about what this relationship means. What we learn here is that God is ever powerful and when we stop resisting either overtly or subtly we can see that God is available to give us every bit of strength and peace and a steady resiliency. This means that from this standpoint of joining with God, we become bigger and better from feeling this extraordinary and perfect love of God.
Then we share in every wonderful aspect of what it means to be united with God. We just need to show up and get all the gorgeous gifts of God’s giving. We get His vision because God wants us to see only love in the world, a call for love or Love itself. God’s vision is the way we stay tuned into God’s vibration because we see love and extend miracles all of our waking days.