Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Lesson 168: “Your grace is given me. I claim it now.”
I appreciate the Course’s emotional intelligence. Jesus is teaching us to be gentle. Grace is our great gift from God. Grace is when we are in the present moment, when we meet each experience throughout our days with a sense of rightness. We feel accepting of what we see. We meet it with appreciation for what we see instead of judgement. This is the gentleness with which we want to approach all of our circumstances. They are all gifts and they are all opportunities for us to live in the ease and comfort of an attitude of not pushing through what faces us.
When we are aligned with God’s mind, we don’t make haste and push ahead to try to control what we see coming to us. We don’t try to make it a picture our ego deems desirable. We gently lay down our egos at the altar of God and we don’t try to pretend we know better than God about what is the best scenario and best outcome. This is the gift of grace when we aren’t fighting against the moment to make it something else. Then we live in peace because our minds function with a gentle presence but no harsh intentions.
We are being taught how to live in this grace of God all the time. And we are getting the information that it is already in our minds. We don’t even have to make effort to learn this because the information is already within us. We are invited to claim this incredible life lived now because the Course says- all we have to do is claim it. We can just see that it is already done. Then we can notice if we are in any way resisting this simple awareness that God’s infinitely amazing gifts are already ours.
Jesus teaches us here that the love of God is already available and within us at every moment- all we have to do is claim it. The great news is that our access to God’s love is always immediately within us. We just have to be willing to remove the blocks to love’s presence. This is easy too when we realize God is completely invested in giving us the abundant gifts of the kingdom and every worldly gift that is appropriate to our needs. All we have to do is accept it.
Our job is to keep remembering when we forget to love ourselves. Sometimes we just get sidetracked and feel unable to remove these blocks. When the issue is that we forget that we are totally worthy of the most stupendous life with God and as well as on the earth, then what we need to do is take a moment to check into our minds. We must see if we are still holding on onto some story about why we aren’t worthy of the best love there is.
We must take time to heal these parts of us holding onto the pain and the places we are not willing to raise these parts of ourselves to God for complete healing. We just have to know this is just what our egos try to do- to stay paralyzed inside instead of bringing out this past identification we have with being a victim unworthy of God’s perfect life. Let’s just stay tuned in noticing our insanity when it manifests in our not believing we are worthy of God. This is an illusion that we can heal instantly in the light of God’s love.