Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Lesson 224: “What is forgiveness?” “God is my Father and He loves His Son.”
We are ever fortunate because we have direct access to God. We don’t have to go anywhere or to sign up for our God classes and try to manage getting to the wisdom and clarity of God. This is all accessible for us and all we have to do is be willing. The Course says that being in relationship with God is like having a direct download of all of God’s wisdom, kindness and forgiving, non-judgmental nature. We don’t have to hope God will make time for us. God is always in the practice of giving us exactly what we need to be thoroughly content. God is never missing in action. God is forever just within our hearts. There is never a breach in our connection. God always comes through whenever we need Him.
Because God is ever so reliable, all we have to do is be present and have just the smallest amount of awareness that we want His Love and His purpose as our own. We have this amazing fortune of being God’s heirs. God calls us His Sons (and Daughters). This means there is no getting rid of God because God wants to be the natural provider of all that we need to feed ourselves emotionally and physically. God wants to give us each little bit of ease and comfort because this love between parent and child is a given in this current glimpse of humanity.
God is like a parent in some ways in that He loves every moment of caring for us and giving to us. But what is so extraordinary about God is that he is overflowing with abundance. God is not just with a parent style of loving unconditionally but is unconditionally loving in a perfect way. Parents have some of the similar giving styles of what God gives. Jesus wants us to understand what God is actually like, this is why God gets paired with the idea of how our parents are toward us. It gives us a ballpark idea of what God is like.
This is a helpful start. Jesus in the Course is trying to explain what God is like in a way we can readily understand it because if we understand what God is like this will change our behavior. When we understand the extraordinary extent of God’s loving nature, then we are more apt to do our part and show up with willingness to remember God.
However, we learn from the Course that as much like a parent as God is, the one thing that God is not portraying is the neediness that comes with being human. God is coming with His infinite abundance within. People and even parents- no matter how well meaning they may be- are simply always having to manage the limitations of being human. This inevitably means as children of human parents we will miss out often because our parents are always susceptible to feeling like they do not having enough of something or everything. This is why we must simply stay focused on understanding how different God is from our own human parents.