Together, We Light the Way

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Study of the Text, Chapter 8: IV.The Gift of Freedom, Paragraph 1. 8-18-14

IV. The Gift of Freedom
1 If God’s Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will. His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever. When you are not at peace it can only be because you do not believe you are in Him. Yet He is All in all. His peace is complete, and you must be included in it. His laws govern you because they govern everything. You cannot exempt yourself from His laws, although you can disobey them. Yet if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless, because you are denying yourself everything.

I have been out of peace since yesterday. I have a very full schedule for a couple of months and I have been anxious about getting everything done. I am afraid I will run out of time or forget to do something. It is an old story for me, this battle with time. The problem is not time. The problem is that I am refusing to acknowledge God’s Will. It is not that I lack peace, because it is not possible that I be outside peace. To be outside peace I would have to be outside God and there is no “outside God” for me to be.

Peace is the law of God and I cannot exempt myself from it. However, I can disobey God’s laws and as Jesus says, when I do I feel lonely and helpless. I feel this way because I have denied myself everything. This is exactly how I feel when I become anxious about time. I feel lonely and helpless. If I allow myself to stay in that state very long, I get panicky as the ego mind adds more and more upsetting scenarios.

So yesterday afternoon, this anxiety reached a level I could not ignore. I started taking care of a few things, fiddling with the scheduling, writing myself notes. I was busy, busy in the world trying to fix the effects of my problem. All I did was move things around. As I read this morning’s paragraph, I remembered that the source of all problems is in my mind, not in the world. The world is just a picture of the problem in my mind. It is an enactment of my thoughts and beliefs.

I don’t need that old story about time running out. Time is not my enemy. Actually, time is the tool that I am using to heal my mind, so it is my friend. I am happy to release the notion that there is never enough time. I asked the Holy Spirit to remove that old story from my mind and free me of its affects. I don’t want it and I don’t need it.

As I did this I realized that I am not behind on anything. I had a couple of things I actually needed to do this weekend, and they are done. The anxiety is about what I will need to do in the future, so I am worrying about what has not happened and may never happen. That’s just crazy. I also realized that I have a long weekend coming up and that I can use it to catch up. As soon as I let go of the problem created by my thinking mind, answers began to show up without my effort.

The thing that I want never to forget is that I don’t actually “lose” my peace; I push my peace away. It is a deliberate act on my part. Loss of peace is always the refusal on my part to acknowledge God’s law, which is complete peace and joy. I am like a recalcitrant child, refusing to be happy, choosing misery instead, just because I can. Always, I come back to that simple sentence in the Course, “You but do this to yourself.” I am equally free to surrender to His law and accept that I have everything because I was given everything.

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