For All This We Give Up Nothing!

“The new perspective you will gain from crossing over will be the understanding of where Heaven is.  From this side, it seems to be outside and across the bridge.  Yet as you cross to join it, it will join with you and become one with you.  And you will think, in glad astonishment, that for all this you gave up nothing!  The joy of Heaven, which has no limit, is increased with each light that returns to take its rightful place within it.”  (A Course in Miracles, FIP ed., T-16.VI.11)

Today is a joyful day, for doesn’t this quotation remain a harbinger of good things to come?  Heaven joins with us as we cross the metaphorical bridge.  And Heaven is here and now, not on the Other Side solely.  Not that we will find only after death.  We can experience Heaven here and now, and what a blessing this promise is, coming as it does near the beginning of the Text of A Course in Miracles.

How will we recognize Heaven when we have reached it?  Does this question really need answering?  We may actually still experience bad things, but the suffering that we knew previously will depart from us.  Any pain that we might experience can be turned over to the Holy Spirit, and then we can know relief.  This is, after all, still this world, and to believe that we would only experience the good is naïve.  But we will know that the bad that we see is actually only illusion, that this bad is not real.  Unreality is a powerful defense mechanism, and we have hardy tools in our experience now.

We don’t have to sacrifice to reach Heaven on earth.  Sacrifice is never asked of anything.  In the philosophy of ACIM, Jesus himself did not sacrifice when he walked the earth 2,000 years ago.  The idea that he had to die on a cross to save us is not the point, ACIM tells us.  His resurrection is the point, and it is in this way that he saves us.

We don’t lack for anything that Jesus had and has.  He assures us that he walked the pathway before us, but only so that he could help us along the way.  He doesn’t have anything that we lack.  Only time separates our walk, and time does not really exist.

So:  We give up nothing!  And we need do nothing (an ACIM tenet).  When we have reached Awakening, we will reach it with one glad realization, that, for all this, we gave up nothing.  And we need do nothing.

We will have busy doings, but they are of our free choice.  Ask before you embark on anything today.  Ask if that thing is right for you.