Day 105

Today's Lesson:

God's peace and joy are mine.

Today we will accept these gifts of God's peace and joy and we will try to understand that these gifts increase as we receive them. They are not like gifts the world can give, in which the giver loses as he gives the gift; the taker being richer by the giver's loss. Those are not gifts, but bargains made with guilt. The truly given gift entails no loss. This implies a limit or an insufficiency.

Those kinds of gifts are a bid for a more valuable return; a loan with interest to be paid in full; a temporary lending, meant to be a pledge of debt to be repaid with more than was received by him who took the gift. This strange distortion of what giving means pervades all levels of the world we see. It strips all meaning from the gifts we give, and leaves us nothing in the ones we take.

A major learning goal of this course is to reverse our view of giving, so we can receive. Giving has become a source of fear, and so we end up avoiding the only means by which we can receive. We need only accept God's peace and joy, and we will learn a different way of looking at a gift. God's gifts will never lessen when they are given away - they only increase.

True giving is creation. It extends the limitless to the unlimited, eternity to timelessness, and love unto itself. It adds to all that is complete already, not in simple terms of adding more, for that implies that is was less before. It adds by letting what cannot contain itself fulfill its aim of giving everything it has away, securing it forever for itself.

Today we are to begin by thinking of those brothers who have been denied by us the peace and joy that are their right under the equal laws of God. Here we denied them to ourselves. And here we must return to claim them as our own.

We are to think of our "enemies" a little while, and tell each one, as he occurs to us:

My brother, peace and joy I offer you,
That I may have God's peace and joy as mine.

This helps us prepare to recognize God's gifts to us, and lets our minds be free of all that would prevent us from succeeding today. Now we are ready to accept the gift of peace and joy that God has given us. Now we are ready to experience the joy and peace we have denied ourselves. Now we can say, "God's peace and joy are mine," for we have given what we would receive.

Miracles I'm noticing:

There are so many! I just got back from my radio show, which is why today's lesson is posted later than usual. The theme of the show today was "Life is Good!" and I played some great songs that I hadn't heard before I got up early this morning to plan the show and download the music. Among my new favorite songs are: "Life is Good" by James Taylor's brother Livingston Taylor and "Life Has Been Good to Me" written by Randy Newman for the musical "Faust." I got up early to find those songs (like 3:30 a.m.) but didn't listen as closely to them when I downloaded them as when I played them on the air and they're very inspiring. They help me remember that I can choose peace and joy - and every day, every hour, every minute I can make a different (and better) choice.

On my way home I was listening to Oprah's third interview with Esther Hicks on XM radio. What a great message that was! Esther was talking about vibrational energy and that the world isn't ready to hear that term yet. She said that is why she was edited out of the original Secret movie. She then went out to tell a story about how Napoleon Hill, who wrote "Think and Grow Rich" in 1937 also talked about vibrational energy in the original manuscript, but it, too, had to be edited. Now that original version is available - maybe we are starting to be ready to hear more about vibration.

It reminds me of Marcus Buckingham's newest book "Now Put Your Strengths to Work" in which he talks about how disappointed he is that despite all the work he's done in the past 10 years to help people and organizations focus on their strengths, the percentage of engaged employees is actually going down. Maybe that's a good thing, if we consider that we may be on the brink of not just TALKING about these things but actually being called to ACTING on them.

For me it will begin with today's lesson. I know I want to practice letting my mind be free of anything that would prevent success - would block the peace and joy that are mine.

Life is good - that is a fact. We need simply to get rid of the blocks to seeing that. Today in Fargo the sky is bright blue and the clouds are nowhere in sight. That's like knowing that there are no blocks to God's peace and joy. When the clouds come into the sky, that doesn't mean the sun isn't shining - it just means we have to look at it differently.

Miracles abound!