A Course in Miracles Lesson 42

God is my strength. Vision is his gift.

In Nothing Real can be Threatened Tara Singh talked about the distinction between doubt and trust.

The origin of the world we see – a world that is brutal, tyrannical and devoid of love – is doubt. If we had trust, there would be no such problem at all (197).

Lesson 42 invites trust to take the place of doubt. It

. . . sets forth a cause and effect relationship that explains why you cannot fail in your efforts to achieve the goal of this course. You will see because it is the Will of God. It is His strength, not your own, that gives you power. And it is His gift, rather than your own, that offers vision to you (W-pI.42.1:2-5).

We are being asked to trust that God is our strength and that God’s gift to us is the vision to see the real world.

This trust arises in the form of the actual practice, in which we sit quietly and allow course-related thoughts related to God’s gifts to us to arise in mind. We aren’t forcing anything; we aren’t insisting on anything, and we aren’t judging anything. We are seeing what appears in mind when we step back and loosen our sense of possession and control.

It is doubt that makes us write our own meaning on the world. Doubt is ego’s ally, the voice is adopts in order to turn us away from God and the joy and peace offered there. Doubt insists on the validity of ego’s thought system of separation. Doubt says there is no help and we wouldn’t want it anyway.

Thus, in an important way, this lesson becomes an early step in giving attention to the thoughts of God, which appear naturally when and as we gently give attention to them. When we are open and receptive, those thoughts arise because sharing our being with God is “the most natural thing in the world” (W-pI.41.8:2).

Tara Singh asks if we are ready to refuse to deviate into the pattern of our separation-based thinking, if we are ready to refuse to accept our private thoughts as real.

To do so, you must call upon something more powerful than thought. It is called trust and it never ceases to see the world of thought as unreal. Unless there is that strength, the fluctuations between doubt and trust will continue (201).

But we need not fear. What God asks of us is willingness; if we will give that, then God will supply the strength. And vision – the real world beheld at last – will be restored to remembrance as the gift we are given in creation. It is what we are.

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