Day 152

Today's Lesson:

The power of decision is my own.

Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true. This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. Without the first, the second has no meaning. But without the second, is the first no longer true. Truth cannot have an opposite. Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false.

As God created us, we must remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false. And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response. This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the truth apart from falsehood, and the false kept separate from the truth, as what it is.

Is it not strange to believe that to think we made the world we see is arrogance. God didn't make the world we see. Of this we can be sure. What can He know of the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and lonely, and the mind that lives within a body that must die? We accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. He is not mad. Yet only madness makes a world like this.

To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life; all this is arrogance. Humility would see at once these things are not of Him. And can we see what God created not? To think we can is merely to believe we can perceive what God willed not to be. And what could be more arrogant than this?

Let us today be truly humble, and accept what we have made as what it is. The power of decision is our own. Decide but to accept our rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all we think we made will disappear. What rises to awareness then will be all that there ever was, eternally as it is now. And it will take the place of self-deceptions made but to usurp the altar to the Father and the Son.

Today we practice humility, abandoning the false pretence by which the ego seeks to prove it arrogant. Only the ego can be arrogant. But truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness and its eternal wholeness, all-encompassing, God's perfect gift to His beloved Son. We lay aside the arrogance which says that we are sinners, guilty and afraid, ashamed of what we are; and life our hearts in true humility instead to Him Who has created us immaculate, like to Himself in power and in love.

The power of decision is our own. And we accept of Him that which we are, and humbly recognize the Son of God. To recognize God's Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside, and recognized as false. Their arrogance has been perceived. And in humility the radiance of God's Son, his gentleness, his perfect sinlessness, his Father's Love, his right to Heaven and release from hell, are joyously accepted as our own.

Now do we join in glad acknowledgment that lies are false, and only truth is true. We think of truth alone as we arise, and spend five minutes practicing its ways, encouraging our frightened minds with this:

The power of decision is my own. This day I will accept myself as what my Father's Will created me to be.

Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deception, as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God, as it was meant to be.

In patience we will wait for Him throughout the day, and hourly invite Him with the words with which the day began, concluding it with this same invitation to our Self. God's Voice will answer, for He speaks for us and for our Father. He will substitute the peace of God for all our frantic thoughts, the truth of God for self-deceptions, and God's Son for our illusions of ourselves.

Miracles I'm noticing:

It is not up to me to decide who I am; it is up to me to decide who I say I am. And that is a huge difference. The truth is that I am the Child of God. There is no disputing the truth. But what could be in dispute is who I say I am. And, today's lesson tells us that to say anything other than that I am created in the image and likeness of God is arrogant. When who I am is in accord with who I say I am, then I am living in truth.

I met with my friend Dave last night who was working in a town about 45 minutes away. Dave lives in Kentucky, so whenever he is close to where I live, I like to get together with him. When Dave and I get together, our small talk is HUGE, so that's always a great time for me. (If you want to know more about bigger small talk, come to Fargo for the Summit for Bigger Small Talk.)

One of the many things we talked about last night was decision. We said that we really need to decide what it is we want for our lives and then just decide that. The word decide comes from the same root as pesticide, homicide, suicide - and it really means to kill off any other options. Once you decide, you've moved on. And that's the challenge, I think, when it comes to change. We don't really decide to change because we don't kill off the other options - we tend leave a back door open so we can go back to the other way.

In my opinion, this is different than changing our minds. If we really change our minds to move in a new direction, that's different than going back to the old way through the back door. When I talk about changing my mind, I mean making a brand new decision - and killing off the other options.

Dave and I both work a lot in the field of manufacturing, and one of the programs I teach for my manufacturing clients is called Job Relations - helping supervisors with a method for solving problems with people they supervise. This method teaches 4 steps in that process: 1) Get the facts, 2) Weigh and decide, 3) Take action, 4) Check results. Step three in the process is weigh and decide. It gives a chance to really think about all the options before making a decision - killing off the other options and the taking action. That method supports today's lesson.

Today's text also talks about decision. If we are steadfastly devoted to misery, we must first recognize that we are miserable and not happy. If we believe that our misery is happiness, we begin to believe in what is not the truth. We believe that "nothing" has value, and work to add value to it. A little piece of glass, a speck of dust, a body or a war become the same to us. If we value one thing made of nothing, we have believed that nothing can be precious, and that we can learn how to make the untrue true.

The real lesson - that only truth is true - is too simple for twisted minds. We have made so many distortions of nothing. Nothing is so alien to us as the simple truth, and there is nothing we are less inclined to listen to. We seem to be so tied up in what we think we believe, that we give up being happy in order to be right.

The text today also tells us that the Holy Spirit brings the light of truth into darkness, and lets it shine on us as well. As it shines our brothers see it, and realizing that this light is not what we have made, they see it in us more than we see.

When we teach anyone that only truth is true, we learn it with them. And so we learn that what seemed hardest was the easiest. We can learn to be a happy learner. We will never learn how to make nothing everything. When we see that this is what we have been trying to do, we will recognize how foolish that has been.

If we trust that only the truth is true and there are no other options, then we have made a decision. And, according to today's lesson, that is really all we need to decide. The rest will take care of itself because we have the power of the Holy Spirit. Recognizing that it is arrogant to believe anything else is a huge step in getting to the truth. And, for me, that's truly a miracle!