ACIM Workbook Lesson 213 Insights

Review: “I am not a body. I am free. I am still as God created me.”
“All things are lessons God would have me learn.”

It seems most of the lessons we learn in life are learned from pain. Our lessons teach us what we don’t want to do in order to avoid pain more than what to do to experience happiness. With this as our history, the statement, “All things are lessons God would have me learn” can easily carry the connotation that God’s lessons are painful. But this interpretation is simply our own projection of the past. God’s lessons are miracles that free us from our self-taught lessons of pain. God would have us learn lessons that lead us out of pain.

Yet the ego whispers and sometimes proclaims loudly that God’s lessons require sacrifice. The ego would want us to believe we must give up what is valuable if we are to learn of God. From the ego’s perspective, this is correct, because what the ego values is really nothing, meaningless.

If we are to experience what is truly meaningful — the Love of God — we do have to give up our investment in the empty promises of specialness offered by the ego. But we give up nothing in order to gain everything. This the ego does not tell us because when we give up the desire for specialness, we give up the ego. Without our investment in the values of the ego, it has no power, no substance. The ego’s only “control” over us comes from our attachment to the ego’s teachings.

We are not asked to give up this attachment in one gut wrenching battle in which all we think is important is ripped from our clutching hands. Rather, every moment is offered, gently and lovingly, as a lesson from God in which we learn to see what is valueless and what has true value. This is the miracle, the transformed perception.

When we recognize what is valueless, there is no sense of loss in laying it down. It is done with happy laughter, for we already see the joyous alternative God has offered in its place. Today I resign as my own teacher. I choose to learn God’s lessons that I may be free to live in His Love and peace.

© 2003, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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