Lesson 139: I will accept Atonement for myself.
Check out any bookstore (perhaps online these days) and you’ll find shelves full of “self-help” books that promise to help you live a purpose-filled life, figure out who you really are and what it is you’re supposed to be doing on this earth. If you believe this lesson, and take its message to heart, you can save yourself a lot of money and time. You don’t need a self-help book, this lesson tells us, you simply need to make the only choice truly available to any of us: remember who you truly are.
You are a child of God. You are not your body. You are not your career. You are not your relationships. You are not your family. You are not anything in this world of illusion. You are in your body, your career, your relationships, your family and whatever else is occurring in your life for one reason: to remember who you are.
This world was created when we became confused about who we truly are – when we doubted, for a nanosecond, our true nature as an infinite being that is – and will always be – part of God. The Course tells us this happened when we “forgot to laugh,” and now we take things so seriously. We write and read books on how to improve ourselves, how to find spiritual and personal fulfillment and how to get back to God – as if we have actually left our Holy home.
We believe we have a myriad of choices to make – as many, or more, than those titles on the shelves. This lesson reminds us there is truly only one choice – to accept Atonement for ourselves. The Atonement is the Holy’s plan to correct our faulty perception that we are separate from one another and God. When we choose Atonement, we express our willingness to use our lives as a classroom where everything that happens to us, and every thought we think, we turn back over to the Holy to use as a way to teach us and remind us of who we truly are.
This is not something we accomplish alone, this lesson reminds us: “What we accept as what we are proclaims what everyone must be, along with us. Fail not your brothers, or you fail yourself. Look lovingly on them, that they may know that they are part of you, and you of them.”
Accepting the Atonement for ourselves means that we recognize our responsibility in this world to become the Love we wish to see out here in the world. The ego miscreates from fear, but our true, divine Self creates from Love, and what we create from Love becomes true in this world, since Love is the only thing that is real.
Our challenge from today’s lesson is chuck all the self-help advice the ego world offers us and take the only advice that matters – accept the Atonement for yourself. Accept the Holy Spirit’s correction of your thinking. Be willing to see beyond the madness, the fear that the ego projects. Be willing to see beyond the appearance of evil and recalcitrance in those around you. Use your choice to be as God made you – Love incarnate – to help redeem this world and bring all of our siblings together.
Once we can remember who we are and truly embrace it – the world will remember its true identity as well and we will find that we have never truly left paradise.
Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash