Part II:1 WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?
Lesson 228 God Has Condemned Me Not. No More Do I.
- My Father knows my holiness. Shall I deny His knowledge, and believe in what His knowledge makes impossible? Shall I accept as true what He proclaims as false? Or shall I take His Word for what I am, since He is my Creator, and the One Who knows the true condition of His Son?
- Father, I was mistaken in myself, because I failed to realize the Source from Which I came. I have not left that Source to enter in a body and to die. My holiness remains a part of me, as I am part of You. And my mistakes about myself are dreams. I let them go today. And I stand ready to receive Your Word alone for what I really am.[1]
Today’s Meditation
It takes a lot of courage to accept our holiness in God. When we think of ourselves as a body we are at the mercy of our hunger, our drives for sex, for power, for love and belonging. We love the rush of adrenalin that surges through our brains when we are excited. We love the sense of power and control we experience when we learn how to manipulate people and events to suit our own purposes. Our unfulfilled needs and abuses lead us through strange and dark corridors, we develop addictions, perversions, and a warped sense of right and wrong. At the very least, we are taught to fear God instead of love Him. We are taught that God is out to punish us instead of waking us up to bring us home. We are taught guilt and shame, sacrifice and bloodshed rather than accepting our true identity as God’s beloved Son.
Today we accept our holiness with valor, quiet happiness and delight. We know now who and what we are and who and what we are not. We realize our mistakes. We accept that all those mistakes are part of a dream of being separate from God, of being who and what we made instead of who and what God made. Today we look at our mistakes and let them go. We no longer want to be anybody but whom God created. We no longer want to confuse our bodies with who and what we really are. We remember the God in us today. We take His Words and make them our own.
Remind yourself often throughout the day that God is holy and what He creates is like Him. A holy God makes holy creations. Accept your holiness and do not let it frighten you. Holiness is real; unholiness is not. Holiness is forever; unholiness exists in a realm of time that passes away and is no more. No matter who you are or what you have done in the flesh will change who and what you are in the eyes of God. The mistakes we make in the flesh, no matter how seemingly trivial or vile have no lasting value. When we bring them to the light, learn all we can from them, confess and give them to God, they melt away and are remembered no more.
When we are plagued by guilt and shame, sorrow and sadness, we must stand strong and remind ourselves of who we are in Christ. We are one with Him as God’s Beloved Son. Ask the Lord to reveal to you what He wants you to do with the guilt and shame, the sorrow and sadness. Perhaps He will lead you to reach out to someone you have hurt in the past to express a sincere apology.
Several years ago, Holy Spirit led me to ask forgiveness from my first husband for not being kind, for being emotionally and physically abusive, for playing mean tricks on him, for blaming him for things that I was guilty of myself. So many people told me not to apologize to him – they felt as if his sins had so outweighed my own that he deserved all the ways I had devised to get even with him. They thought that to apologize to him would be encouraging him to see my faults while not acknowledging his own. It was his third wife who picked up the phone when I called. Even she did her best to talk me out of apologizing to him. She told me several things about him that convinced me that I must have been wrong – surely Holy Spirit would never have me apologize to such a man.
Sadly, I followed her advice rather than obeyed the leading of Holy Spirit. A few years later, Kenneth died a painful, lonely, premature death leaving a wake of hurt and pain and bitterness behind him. I will never know how a simple apology for my own shortcomings and failings may have led him to surrender his own. All I know is that I allowed others to convince me not to go with God’s Will and therefore I did not accept my own holiness.
Let us continue in our daily practices to align our wills with God’s Will. We will make mistakes, but we will not let them discourage us or tempt us to give up our return to God. Our mistakes do not define us, they do not hold us back, they do not have any real substance, they only last as long as we need them to learn the lessons we must learn. Today we know that God does not condemn us for any mistakes we make in the dream of separation. So we will not condemn ourselves either. Just as we are to forgive others, we forgive ourselves for we know Who made us as our God, our Father, our King.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 228. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
Audio credit: The Friar Patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com
