Part 1 Undoing the Way We See Things Now
Lesson 50 I Am Sustained by the Love of God.
- Here is the answer to every problem that will confront you, today and tomorrow and throughout time. In this world, you believe you are sustained by everything but God. Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols: pills, money, protective clothing, influence, prestige, being liked, knowing the right people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness that you endow with magical powers.
- All these things are your replacements for the love of God. All these things are cherished to ensure a body identification. They are songs of praise to the ego. Do not put your faith in the worthless. It will not sustain you.
- Only the Love of God will protect you in all circumstances. It will lift you out of every trial and raise you high above all the perceived dangers of this world into a climate of perfect peace and safety. It will transport you into a state of mind that nothing can threaten, nothing can disturb, and where nothing can intrude upon the eternal calm of the Son of God.
- Put not your faith in illusions. They will fail you. Put all your faith in the love of God within you; eternal, changeless, and forever unfailing. This is the answer to whatever confronts you today. Through the love of God within you, you can resolve all seeming difficulties without effort and ensure confidence. Tell yourself this often today. It is a declaration of release from the belief in idols. It is your acknowledgement of the truth about yourself.
- For 10 minutes, twice today, morning and evening, let the idea for today sink deep into your consciousness. Repeat it, think about it, let related thoughts come to help you recognize its truth, and allow peace to flow over you like a blanket of protection and surety. Let no idle and foolish thoughts enter to disturb the holy mind of the Son of God. Such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Such is the resting place where your Father has placed you forever.[1]
Notes and Personal Application (2019): My first 10-minute meditation: I am sustained by the Love of God. I do not put my faith and trust in my sister or brother, my husband, or money, my house or car or medicine or the love that I have for my children and grandchildren. I am sustained by the Love of God. This does mean that this is all I have that is going for me and that I can truly depend upon. The Love of God will help me to survive the ego in me and in others. The Love of God envelops me and keeps me from insanity and feeling shorted and inferior when my sister talks about things that do not include me, that purposefully excludes me. The Love of God sustains my sister when I talk about things that do not include her and that purposefully or not purposefully excludes her. It is the Love of God that sustains us, not each other. I am not sustained by anything in the world, nobody and nothing can sustain me except the Love of God. The Love of God holds my hand and gives to me what I need to thrive, to survive, to feel happy and restful and calm and good. The Love of God gifts me with abundance and with a full belly and a happy and calm and sane mind. The Love of God gives me good things so that I never have to feel inferior or ashamed. The Love of God sustains me. I am sustained by the Love of God. I do not trust in my degrees. I am happy that I have them but they do not sustain me. I do not trust in my pantry and my supplies of good food and knowing how to prepare delicious meals. I am happy for the food and for the appliances and for the pleasure in cooking and the knowing how to do it, but it does not sustain me. Only the Love of God sustains me. I am sustained by the Love of God. My pretty clothes do not sustain me. I am happy to have nice clothes and a nice and healthy body in which to wear my pretty clothes and for which my pretty clothes protect my body, but my nice wardrobe does not sustain me. Only the Love of God sustains me in this world. My husband whom I love and appreciate so very much does not sustain me. I am tempted at times to believe that he does, because his love feels so much like the Love of God, but it is the Love of God shining through him that sustains me. My children and the love that I have for them and the affection and the pride that I have in them does not sustain me. I am tempted at times to believe that they do, but it is the Love of God shining through my mother love and mother pride that truly sustains me. My dear Father in Heaven, loves me and calls to me and accepts me into the Sonship of God. I am part of His holy kingdom and He is the one who sustains me. There are so many things that I feel sustain me at times, but this is all a trick of the ego and all amount to nothingness without the Love of God. I am thinking of that Korean missionary who had the Holy Spirit holding his hand while he was being persecuted for preaching the gospel in North Korea and I believe that it is the Love of God that sustained him and that it is the Love of God who sustains me and will always sustain me no matter what trial I think that I am going through. Today while I was at lunch there was this temptation to think that my sister resents me and everything I say and do, there is this stab inside when she mentions Allan and Peyton and this one and that one. I feel so bereft, O Most High, and I ask that this feeling of being bereft is healed in both of us and that we both come to realize in the very deepest part of us that the Love of God sustains us. In Jesus name. Amen.
Notes and Personal Application (2020): Here is the answer to every problem, Jesus tells us today in our lesson. Here in the world we feel as if we are sustained by everything but God, yet nothing here will sustain us. They are only temporal substitutes for the Love of God. Put not your faith in them, Jesus tells us, for they will fail us. When we put all of our faith and trust in the Love of God, we release ourselves from our false belief in idols. It is the way we acknowledge that none of this is real! That our only reality is in God.
Yesterday I ran into an old flame. We laughingly talked about old times. “If only I could have those days back again. I would give anything,” he said. And all I could do was stand there aghast. Really? It was such a jolt to me that we had entirely different versions of that old fling. The whole scenario from start to finish was a song of praise to the ego. We had spent our passions on what was worthless. It had sustained neither one of us. If it lifted us up only to tear us down again. To long for that hellishness, would be to long for despair! But my old beau was seeing it through the gentle eyes of love and forgiveness while I was seeing in through the eyes of judgment and condemnation. It gave me something to ponder, and pondering, well that’s my second nature.
After mulling over this for quite some time, today’s lesson idea helped me to gain a new understanding of what I kept missing in my efforts to realize. Just because I had put my faith in our special relationship to take the place of what God alone can give, did not mean that he had made the same mistake. What was a joyous jaunt in romance for him remained joyous in his memories. For me, who was attempting to find my sustenance through the wrong means, the pleasant memories are shadowed by self-reproach and spite.
Our husbands, lovers, best friends, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers cannot sustain us. Our social connections and our wealth, our businesses and our possessions, our churches and our synagogues, no matter how nice and benign they may appear, are not where our faith belongs! They will fail us. They will disappoint us. They will not be the people we want them to be. They will do things that we know are wrong; they will get sick; they will die. Nobody can replace the Love of God and the sooner we realize this the better. Otherwise, it is such a terrible shock to our system that we can flounder in nothingness for a long time, leading to an ongoing sense of despair, confusion, and depression in which it seems impossible to recover. In that state we are no good to ourselves or others.
My life has been a story of loss. Everything and everyone that I have ever put my trust in has failed me, or worse, I have failed them. The Love of God is that which sustains me. I do not find my sustenance through my marriage, through my children or grandchildren, through my sisters or brothers, through my nieces and nephews. I do not find my sustenance through my family bloodlines or affiliations. I do not find my sustenance through a church or social organization. I do not find my sustenance through my talents, gifts, and achievements. All of these things are nice to have, but like my old flame, I can only truly look at my life through the eyes of love when I am not looking at my relationships and my possessions, my talents, and my worldly treasures to take the place of God’s Love.
It is only God’s Love which protects us at every moment and in every circumstance. It is only God’s Love which can take our past and transform it into loving, treasured memories in place of disappointment and loss. When we can look at our past without rancor, we will know that we are no longer putting our faith in nothingness which we have endowed with magical powers. We will be able to forgive those who disappointed us because we realize our shared humanity, our shared separateness, our shared and certain need for return to God. We will no longer wallow in grief and a sense of loss over our loved ones who are no longer here in the flesh but will instead be filled with gratitude for the time we had with them, no matter how short the years. We will take a look at our failed marriages, relationships, and family estrangements, and realize they were replacements for the Love of God, made to cherish and ensure body identification, a song of praise to the ego. Let us today, own our part in this corruption.
It is very important that we realize that God did not set it up this way to trip us up and break our wills and prove to us how weak we are without Him. This is a very common misconception that we need to address – as long as we think that God is this big bully who causes our marriages to fail, our romantic entanglements to falter; who bankrupts our businesses and kills off our sons and daughters to wake us up and bring us back to Him, we are relating to a false god and it is a false god which will seem to answer your prayers. Our lesson today simply speaks of truth:
We are Sons of God. Created in His Image. We are not bodies. We are Spirits. We are genderless, limitless, and eternal. When we identify with bodies, we get what we identify with. We get life and death, light and darkness, love and fear, goodness and that which is not good. God does not set out to steal anything away from us. We are in a dream of separation; yearning for God’s Love and replacing it with idols that ensure we continue to identify with our bodies instead of our everlasting Spirits.
God is not punishing us for our own good. We are punishing ourselves by identifying with the ego and making bodies our end. God did not disappoint me in love with my string of “bad” boyfriends. There was nothing bad about them. There was nothing bad about me. I was just barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. Looking for God’s Love where it was not.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 50 I am sustained…Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992). p. 79.
the friar patch 