Day 103

Today's Lesson:

God, being Love, is also happiness.

Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it. Nor can happiness be experienced where love is not. Love has no limits, being everywhere. And therefore joy is everywhere as well. Still our minds deny that this is so, believing there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy. This strange belief would limit happiness by redefining love as limited, and introducing opposition in what has no limit and no opposite.

Fear then gets associated with love, and we begin to believe more in what we have made than in what is real. This is the basic error we will correct with today's lesson. We can tell ourselves

God, being Love, is also happiness.
To fear Him is to be afraid of joy.

As we allow this one correction to be placed within our minds each hour today, we will be able to welcome all the happiness it brings as truth replaces fear, and joy becomes what we expect to take the place of pain.

We might add to the above thought:

I cannot fail, because I seek the truth.

Miracles I'm noticing:

I often ask audiences to think for themselves what, specifically, they are afraid of. This is one of those questions - like "what do you want?" that seems to have an easy answer, but once you really think about it, it's not so easy. Last December in one of my sessions, I asked the group if they would share what they had talked about in their pairs dialogue. One woman said she was afraid of success. She was in sales, and had quotas set for her. She was afraid to achieve her goals because she knew they would just raise the quotas once she met them, and she knew she would have worked that hard to achieve it, just to have it raised again. So she kept coming in just under the quota so it wouldn't get raised, but she never really felt that she had accomplished anything.

One other woman in the class said that her definition of success was much different. She viewed success as joy and happiness and fulfillment in her life. I asked the first woman if that definition of success changed her relationship with it - was she still afraid of success? And she admitted that she wasn't - in fact she would seek that out. A simple shift in the way we perceive something can give us very different results.

That reminds me of today's lesson. We tell ourselves that "it's too good to be true," or "there's no such thing as a free lunch," or "you can't get something for nothing," and we set out on a road of cynicism and resignation - all so we can be right.

Where might you be giving up the right to be happy in order to be right? If we seek the truth, we cannot fail, because God is love and God is happiness. They are not mutually exclusive!