Day 209

Today's Review:

I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.

(189) I feel the Love of God within me now.

The Love of God is what created me. The Love of God is everything I am. The Love of God proclaimed me as His Son. The Love of God within me sets me free.

I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.

Miracles I'm noticing:

I'm just finishing Eric Butterworth's book, written in 1968, called Discover the Power Within You and it's given me an entirely new perspective on Christianity, God, and spirituality. Butterworth was a Unity minister whose specialty was practical mysticism. On the back of the book it says he is often described as "the modern-day Emerson" (no wonder I like him!).

This book makes the course work we're doing here so much more logical and practical than my strict Christian upbringing did. The first year studying the course I remember feeling a lot of questions, but they were strictly based on my upbringing, which was steeped in a literal translation of the Bible. Butterworth's book points out how really gifted a storyteller Jesus was, and how he had a wonderful way of using parables and stories to make a point. It tells the same Bible stories, but shows what the original translations were for some of the stories we've come to see as more literal and we find that Jesus' gift for parables and the language of his day means something much different than what many of us have been raised to believe.

Here's an example:

"The miracle is in the availability of substance, not particularly in the way it manifests. When Jesus was confronted with the need to pay the Roman tax, He simply told Peter to go fishing and that he would find a gold coin in the mouth of a fish (Matt. 17:27). Peter did as he was asked and he found the coin in the fish's mouth and used it to pay the tax. It is too bad that this story has been related so literally, since there is an increase in the 'credibility gap' for the intellect. Actually, when we know the idiom, there is nothing unusual about this story at all. What was more natural than for Peter, who was a fisherman, to go fishing, market the fish, and pay the tax with the proceeds. This is exactly what the story says idiomatically.

"In our West, the cattlemen talk about a steer being worth 'forty dollars on the hoof.' In the Orient, they talk about an ox having 'twenty gold pieces in his horn.' And in the Middle East, we find this expression among fishermen: 'The fish had a gold coin in his mouth.' In every case, these are figures of speech referring to the ultimate market price to be gained from the sale of the product.

"Jesus is teaching the lesson that when you have a need, the answer is right where you are. The miracle may not be in the way it manifests, but in the ever-availability of ideas, of guidance, of all things working together for good. You may be guided to go fishing, or to get a job, or to 'break' the loaves and fishes. But there is abundance for you - if you accept it" (p. 182).

So this book has given me a whole new understanding of even what I'm learning in this course. It is the Love of God which sets me free to do and be and have everything in this wonderfully abundant universe. I really am free when I see everything as a miracle, instead of seeing nothing as a miracle.