Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Lesson 363: “This holy instant would I give to You. Be You in charge. For I would follow You, certain that Your direction gives me peace.”
What happens when we feel no sense of direction we necessarily feel anxious and stressed. When we wander through life with no clear call that we can recognize and then interpret into what actions are appropriate in which to partake, we don’t know what we are meant to live we definitely are not living well. The world is always a plethora of possibilities. The world gives us endless options and people often equate having a variety of options as something about which we are happy. The ego is big on making a big to do in the world when it seems like we have a grand choice about what to do and where to go. The world values the position of having all kinds of possibilities.
I appreciate the Course’s clear direction and the teaching that God is giving us rather a simple decision that is in fact already made for us. The Course says we don’t have to agonize over the simple choice of whether we want to join God because this is already made for us. This saves us an untold amount of time. When we spend our lives wondering what to choose this causes us some level of anxiety because we don’t have clarity about what is the simple and straightforward choice we need to make. God says in the Course that God and we are always bound to be together at least eventually if not in this very moment. God would not have us floundering around with a lack of certainty about what is our purpose and with whom it is we belong.
Twenty years ago I was a foreign exchange student at a University in Tokyo for a year abroad. This was a very eye opening experience because suddenly in living in this foreign city everything seemed strange because it was all so different from my usual American life. I remember being in the grocery store there and I was wanting to buy peanut butter. I was amazed because they had only two kinds of peanut butter there. I was awed because American stores are vastly different. You get a whole aisle of peanut butter.
What struck me there is how much time we waste in this American country making decisions from this huge expanse of choices. In this country big is better we think. We tend to think that something of value comes from such an infinite number of choices. I just became quite aware of our cultural need for big and many and how that seemed to me like such a waste of energy and resources. I felt for the first time how lovely it was that the choices of peanut butter were so few. It made my process of making decisions infinitely more manageable.
I love that the Course does the same thing. God says that we are simply needing to make the choice to choose God. And this is the easiest choice ever because it is already made for us by our own minds long before we ever believed a separation from God could ever happen.