XI. The State of Grace, Paragraph 2
2 Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When he is not in a state of grace, he is out of his natural environment and does not function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment that he has made. He therefore cannot adapt to it, nor can he adapt it to him. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is with God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond anything he can make.
Being with God is the only state that is natural to us and the only state in which we will not experience strain. I thought about the idea of strain and I realized that this was true. I strain to be happy, seeking more money, satisfying relationships, a better body. It is incredible the amount of time and effort I have put into these things in the past hoping something would make me happy.
The sentence that says it all for me is: “There is no point in trying.” This is where I am right now. There is no point in trying to make myself happy through earning more money or going on another diet or getting people to like me. None of this makes me happy. I might get a brief sense of satisfaction, but then I think of something else I believe I need and happiness bursts like a soap bubble when you try to catch it.
So I surrender. I surrender not in the sense of giving up, but I surrender to grace. I will still earn money and ask for guidance in my relationships. I will still watch what I eat and take vitamins and maybe I will even exercise this body if I absolutely have to. But I will not look to these things for happiness. They will just be things I do, not the answer to my quest for peace and joy and love.
It takes a lot of vigilance to notice when I have reverted to being in charge of my happiness through manipulating the world. It is all I have known while in the illusion and I do it unless I deliberately choose not to. I have been doing a lot of computer work the last few days and my hand has started hurting when I type.
The thought in my mind is that I am not happy because my hand hurts. Then the ego mind starts looking for solutions, and this leads to looking for targets onto which I can project the blame for my predicament. The situation gets complicated really fast and impossible to solve to my satisfaction. Just this one small thing causes life here to be a strain, and my day has hardly begun.
I ask Holy Spirit how to see this differently. He reminds me that there is no point in trying to use the world to be happy and no point in trying to manipulate the world to make myself happy. It will just increase the strain. Instead, He directs me toward my purpose. I remember that there is no pain.
I remember that it is not the Will of God that I suffer and so I cannot suffer. (As I type this, the pain in my hand increases exponentially and I see my resistance, but as soon as I see it, I let it go and the pain fades away.) This is my purpose, to use the world to allow the world to be undone. There is an environment in which I can live without strain, but to return to that environment, I must first give up the one I made to take its place.
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