Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Lesson 105: “God’s peace and joy are mine.”
We must be very careful about how we take in the joy from the world. It can be like a hook on a fishing line. We are minding our own business, swimming along, and- what do you know- we don’t even especially see it or recognize it because it blends in so well. All we know is that we are in pain and in a bind. And, this joy, the hook, can be intense so our ego self craves the ups and downs. We can get totally stuck and taken off guard because we may think we are noticing, but then suddenly this thrill that is not shared with God gets us in the gut. And we pay much attention to it. We are asked to understand what is not of God is always going to leave us in peril.
What we must absolutely do is don’t settle for anything less than God’s joy, because God’s is of a quality is so high and so real and comfortable that it is the dream of what we want more than anything. We must practice choosing God’s love and peace specifically. We must do this for ourselves as the happiest reality because God wills it for our lives. We are simply asked to make no move without God and fill our minds with nothing but God’s supreme love. Then we will be utterly joyous because we are fulfilling our function and destiny. Thus, we get to be happy because God wills us to be happy and also because we are enjoying a sense of fulfillment- living our highest truth.
We can be in the world and experience the range of joy and happiness there. What we simply are learning in the Course to do is wholeheartedly get into the pleasure of what we find there. This is another gift from God, as everything is a gift from God. We simply need to remember all the time that we need to release our attachment to the happiness. When we stand there with pointed finger and demand the happiness occur in a certain way, we are getting lost in the attachment. What we are asked to do instead is simply laugh, play, sing, and revel in the pleasure. And within our minds, just keep checking in with our tendency to judge and control. Then let this all go because the attachment to the outcome is the source of our misery; it is never what is actually happening. When we forgive everything that seems a little off from what we wanted, then, we can live in true peace and joy.
This lesson says, “God’s gifts will never lessen when they are given away.” The Course’s view of God’s gifts completely defies the laws of the world. The world is filled with limits and limited thinking. We are asked to change our way of seeing what God brings. Because God’s peace and joy are infinite, there is never a moment when we must worry about sharing this with others because then we will have less. We are asked to see that we must reshape our relationship to giving. We very often are afraid of giving because we believe in the world’s idea of scarcity. Just know Jesus invites us to heal this in ourselves. We had wrong information about the way God works. Now we can make it anew.