In the first class, we looked at the ultimate emptiness and irrelevance of money. In yesterday’s class, we looked at how the Holy Spirit will supply our financial needs.
In our usual mode, we think salvation lies in having things. We are into “possession for its own sake.” In this mode, we decide what we want and need, and then we go about trying to get it for ourselves. This takes up just about all of our time and energy. In the process, we see our brothers as having what we need and wrongfully withholding it from us. We, then, have to find a way to pry it out of their clenched fingers. This puts us in a negative relationship with them (thus ironically cutting us off from our true avenue of supply).
The result of all this is that we become attached to this world, and this slows us down on our journey home. It’s as if all our things and money are heavy lead weights that we have to hoist and carry, slowing us down on the only journey that matters.
The Course is holding out to us an entirely different mode. In this mode, we recognize that left to our own devices we will value money and things as ends in themselves, thus slowing our return to God. And so we back away from deciding for ourselves what we need. We leave that to the Holy Spirit, trusting that only He knows the things we truly need, the things that will not weigh us down on our journey but actually help us move forward.
Not only do we let the Holy Spirit decide what we need, we let Him supply us with those things. This is an enormous time-saver, for now we don’t have to spend all our time slaving away for our material needs. We can lean back and let Him supply all that for us.
But how do we let Him supply our money and things? The consistent answer in the Course is that we devote ourselves single-mindedly to fulfilling our part in His plan, which means extending help and healing to those people He sends us. The Course says this in different ways. It says that if we accept His plan as the only function that we would fulfill, then He will arrange everything else for us without our effort. It says that if we devote ourselves to doing our part in His plan, He will give us what we need, to allow us to stay on earth and to help us better serve the plan.
The Course outlines a process in which we first have—having received understanding from God—then we give—we give to our brothers what we’ve received (this will often, of course, include giving material things)—then we receive. This receiving is in essence psychological and interpersonal, but it includes receiving the money we need as well. Technically speaking, this isn’t our brothers supplying our needs; it is God supplying our needs through our brothers. It’s crucial that we understand that all that we have comes from God.
Through our giving, then, we receive. This works even on the most concrete of levels. When we give a material thing—if it’s a true gift, a true expression of love—then that giving strengthens the idea that that thing represented for us. And since the thing itself was just a manifestation of that idea, now that the idea is strengthened, a form of that idea will come back to us to take the place of the form we gave away. And this new form, being a manifestation of a now strengthened idea, will actually be more “acceptable” to us, more useful.
So the basic idea is that if we transfer our valuing away from material things and towards our function of extending to others (which is the essence of our part in His plan), then we can just devote ourselves to that function, and leave the material side of things to Him—letting Him decide what we need and letting Him supply our needs. He will take care of these things, not so that we can exult in having wealth from God, but so that we can take our minds off of them, so we can be freed up to do what we are really here for, and so we can have only those things that contribute to our journey home.
I have to say that this message really hit me. I can’t say that it’s new—I’ve known it for some time. Maybe it was the right time this time. But today as I go through my day, I just can’t get it off my mind. If I am just single-minded in my giving, if all I do is shine light in all directions, then I can leave the rest to the Holy Spirit. He will free me from having to turn aside and deal with all that stuff I don’t like dealing with. I can spend all my time and energy doing what, in truth, I enjoy most—being truly helpful.
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