Lesson 40: I am blessed as a Son (or Child) of God.
I knocked a full glass of my morning iced coffee onto the floor sometime last year, and watched as the glass shattered, spattering coffee everywhere like a caffeine crime scene.
I burst into tears. I wasn’t crying over spilled latte as much as the shattering glass and coffee explosion reminded me that life hadn’t really panned out the way I imagined it would when I was a kid. I was in the midst of a divorce and had just moved into a new house. All the ideas and plans I had conjured up for my life – the fame, the fortune, heck, even just a bit of recognition and enough money in the bank – had not seemed to appear as I thought they should have.
My life felt just as shattered as the glass I now had to clean up off the floor.
In that moment, the last thing I felt was blessed, as a Child of God or otherwise.
We all have these moments when life overwhelms us, when we feel like our dreams are cracked or obliterated, and our sense of self-worth hits zero. In those moments of stress, depression and anxiety, it’s easy to feel worthless, to feel defeated by life and count the ways we have failed in this world.
The good news is this: It’s not the world’s idea of success we need to strive for, anyway. Who we are in this world is not a reflection of our true, divine Self. There are many people in this world who are not conventionally “successful” but they live lives full of joy, peace and love without the trappings the world insists marks you as a “success.”
It’s easy to get down on ourselves when things around us seem to indicate that we’re not successful or that our time here has been wasted. The Course, through the lessons so far, has been trying to get us to see things differently – to understand that what we see out here is a reflection of how we’re using – or usually misusing – the power of our mind to create fear, misery and anxiety instead of joy, love and peace.
If you’re not seeing a peaceful and joyful world, that’s because you haven’t found peace and joy within. You still believe you are unworthy of peace and joy.
Today’s lesson is a tool to help you reclaim your true, divine Self – that part of you that doesn’t worry about success in the world because all it knows is success in Love, since it cannot fail to be the Love from which is was created.
When we reach zero – that place where we think we’ve hit the bottom in this bodily world – count it as a blessing, because now you can begin counting what matters in life – your status as a Child of God who is holy and through their holiness can save the world. That’s better than anything worldly fame and fortune can bring, because when we know this concept in our bones, we will achieve a peace that surpasses any worldly success.
Let yourself be saved by zero, as The Fixx sang back in the 80s:
“Maybe
I’ll win (saved by zero)
Holding onto words
that teach me
I will conquer
space around me”
Or as Hafiz puts it: “Zero is where the real fun starts: there is too much counting everywhere else.”
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