STRENGTH

Note: Published in Miracles magazine (Jon Mundy, publisher)

I can give you my strength until yours is as certain as mine. . . . (WOM, Part 1, Lesson 7)

You always choose between your weakness and the strength of Christ in you.  (ACIM, COA ed., T-31. IX.2:3)

I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me.  (Phil. 4:13, KJV)\

            Jesus knew stress in himself while on Earth.  The evidence is in the New Testament: indignantly overturning the moneychangers’ tables in the temple; agonizing in Gethsemane (though no one knew this because his disciples slept; perhaps Jesus told this in his appearances later on); asking God from the cross why he had been forsaken. Yes, this man was fully human—whatever else he also was.

            But he overcame, as he bids us to do.  Again, the New Testament tells us how.  From the cross, rather than thinking of himself, he thought of his mother, standing nearby.  He put her in the care of his beloved disciple, John.  He welcomed a man being crucified beside him into Paradise that very day; he knew that was where he himself was heading. 

Yes, he overcame with strength, and we are bidden to overcome also.  But we have his help.  He shares his divinity with us; he shares his Christhood.  And we are made strong thereby.

We certainly all know stress, but now we discover that we can also know strength.  In both stress and strength, we emulate Jesus.  And he is always here for us.  He promises to come upon a “single unequivocal call.” (ACIM, COA ed., T-4.V.14:10)  

            We need the strength of Christ, by which we mean not just Jesus, but us as well—all the Sons and Daughters of God.  This explanation is a mystical statement of what the term Christ really means.  Let’s put our minds and hearts to the test, to really see how we might emulate Jesus in his strength, knowing that stress can always be set aside.

We will find that our humanity can be championed—not by stress—but by the divinity—the strength—that we all share, with Jesus himself, with Christ.