XI. THE PEACE OF HEAVEN, P 7
7 Have faith in only this one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit will restore your sanity because insanity is not the Will of God. If that suffices Him, it is enough for you. You will not keep what God would have removed, because it breaks communication with you with whom He would communicate. His Voice will be heard.
Journal
Wow! Could Jesus be any clearer? This awakening that we are moving toward, this is going to happen. We cannot fail and this is a hard fact. I know that it doesn’t always seem so. The mind seems to be in control of me sometimes, rather than the other way around. Life seems to be happening to me rather than by me. And it seems the harder I try the less I succeed. But as I continue to do the work regardless of appearances, things start to shift and I notice a forward motion once again. But honestly, I am very appreciative of this paragraph. I am printing this out and keeping it with me for those moments of discouragement.
This morning the daily lesson is another one of those times when Jesus is very clear. He tells us that we have no neutral thoughts and he makes it clear that our thoughts are making the world we see. Every thought contributes to the world, every one of them! I love the way Carol Howe expressed it in her video of the lesson. She said that unspeakable power is passing through the matrix of thoughts I am engaged in and the world as I experience it shows up. I can’t be careless about where I put my attention. I am quite literally making the world with these thoughts.
I mention this because it bears on todays Text passage. Why is it that we need this strong reminder of the inevitable return to God? It is because we have used the power of our thinking to make a world that implies the opposite. Our careless thoughts are making a world that seems to prove we are sinners, that we are helpless victims, that we are fools to hope for the peace of God. With what we think of as idle thoughts we have made a world where there is unkindness and even cruelty every day, everywhere. This is a world of lack and loss, of pain and sickness, of suffering of every kind. Who can hold out hope in the face of this?
And yet, Jesus tells us this in Lesson 16.
The idea for today is a beginning step in dispelling the belief that your thoughts have no effect. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact. Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false. Those that are true create their own likeness. Those that are false make theirs.
So if my world seems impossibly cruel and if I seem to suffer even unto death, it can only be because I made it so. The same unspeakable power that made this mockery of “life” can create from love, joy and peace. What a different world I will see as I change my mind. What a different world I do see as I change my mind. I know this because I have experienced that change as I practice what Jesus tells me in his Course.
I think about my last year at work, and at the relationships that were healed. The world I made at that workplace was one of strife, and of constant conflict. I had reached the point of dreading to show up on Mondays. It stayed that way, and got worse because I chose to tell myself that my distress was caused by the workplace and the people in it. I had all the proof. All I had to do was look around and see the unpleasant people and the misery they caused.
Then when I decided that enough was enough and that there had to be a better way, I surrendered my thoughts to the Holy Spirit and I allowed Him to purify them. The relationships began to heal and the situation changed completely. By the time I left I was in perfect peace with that company, and in love with the people who worked there. They treated me with respect and kindness.
What changed was me. I had been joining with the ego in how I chose to think and therefore what I saw was a reflection of separation. It was stressful and it was suffering. When I changed my mind, I joined with the Holy Spirit and my thinking changed. My new thoughts were more in line with the thoughts of God. They were infused with kindness and love. When that happened, the world I experienced changed. I was a kind and loving world. It was a perfect example of what Lesson 16 is telling us.
There was a time when I used the workplace to prove that I might never return to God, that I was hopelessly entangled with a world over which I had no control. But Jesus is right, God wills I be in Heaven, and nothing can keep me from it, or it from me. Eventually I am going to reach my limit of endurance. I am going to decide that I want out of my darkly wild and imaginative world. And right now what I feel is a longing so intense that it makes me cry to think of it. I long for God. What I know is that I made the world that seems to separate me from God and the same power that made the world will undo this insane thing I have done. I watch my thoughts now with a vigilance born, not of desperation, but of certainty. Thank you for that, Jesus.
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