The Joy of Embracing Life as It Is
by Nancy R Bowers, RScP
What a joy to awaken each day certain in my awareness of the absolute support of the Universe.
Lately, I’ve been noticing all the hidden pockets of fear that have been living in my mind, unexamined, unexposed. I see them cowering. I understand, at long last, the illusion. They are but shadows reflecting back to me where I’ve been harboring exceptions, as if God was absent in that piece. I notice and laugh. How delightful this game of hide-and-seek I’ve been engaged in.
What made that belief so precious that I thought the rules didn’t apply?
I did not make the laws of the Universe, oh wait a minute, yes, I did. Life seems to have presented me with limits and I accepted them. Unable to imagine beyond the edges, I embraced them as reality. Maybe I didn’t invent Universal Law, or Quantum Physics, but these are the “rules” I am playing with. I choose my “I am.” The Law says, “Yes!”
I give up thinking life should be different and at last am willing to own the ugliness I had wanted to exclude. “Ugliness” is my interpretation. Did I forget to see the Love and Beauty beating its heart?
Here, I find the root of my compassion. I pause, and there it is, present in the neutrality of what is, without judgment and without the shadow of fear. I examine the stories I invented, notice where I cloaked them in shadows. I could have chosen peace. And when I see the stories I invented, when I notice how I treated them as reality, I choose again. It was never about denying the pain. It was about noticing that without separation, Life can breathe itself back into the light that is it. Acceptance breathes me back into peace. When I remember, “I do not know what anything is for” (lesson 25, ACIM), I can simply be the love and give up thinking it is my job to fix anything.
My failure to notice God’s presence never stopped It from being.
How grateful I am to notice my underlying assumptions. I was always the author of my world. How sweet it is to see where I have abdicated power and slipped back to victimhood. I choose again.
I am the Love of the Universe. It is all I came to remember.
And so it is. Amen.