Miracles: Take the FreeWay

By Jo Williams

God created a perfect world and pronounced it “good.” Where has that world gone? The standard answer is that we have sinned, fallen short of the glory of God, and royally screwed it up. Yet is man capable of putting asunder what God wills and creates perfect? Some will find the hypothesis in Miracles: Take the FreeWay blasphemous. Some will find it a source of unprecedented hope. No one who reads it will ever see the world again in quite the same way.
Our current rationale and approach to finding peace on earth—sanctimonious judgment, political prowess and military might—not only are not working, they’re disastrous. Take the FreeWay is about finding a better way. It’s about rising above the battleground we call Earth and opening our minds to a radically different view. Based on A Course in Miracles (ACIM), it will challenge the reader to re-evaluate everything he thinks he knows about the world and its Creator.
Although the Bible paints a picture of an erratic, vengeful God, Jesus says, in ACIM, our Creator is neither unpredictable nor capable of violence. God is completely straightforward and unerringly consistent and loving. He has not abandoned us. We have abandoned God.
This is a book about reclaiming the happiness and dominion over our lives that is our divine inheritance. Like the Prodigal, we have squandered that inheritance. Like the father in the parable, Our Father in Heaven patiently awaits our return to joy and sanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jo Williams
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301214266

Jo Williams

A native North Carolinian, Jo Williams' first career was as a teacher and counselor in the North Carolina public schools, where she received state-level recognition for her pioneering work in peer counseling. In 1999, Jo and her husband, Harry, retired to Hilton Head, SC. As Divine Order would have it, that is when her lifelong dreams began to unfold. Along with author/friend Kathryn Wall (the Bay Tannner mystery series), Jo founded the Island Writers Network and wrote her first novel, The Song My Soul Remembers (Coastal Villages Press, 2003). Endorsed by meta-novelist James Redfield, The Song received recognition from The Midwest Book Review as a "poignant tale of self-discovery." As is all her writing, the novel was inspired by A Course in Miracles, her chosen path of spirituality. Jo's passion in life is sharing the life-transforming principles of the Course through speaking, writing, and teaching. To deepen her understanding of those principles, she pursued a doctorate in Divine Metaphysics, which she completed in 2003. Also an award winning, self-taught artist, Jo's paintings have been sold in galleries in both North and South Carolina. Currently, Jo lives in Tampa, Florida, with her husband and their Havanese pup, Magic. She serves as a chaplain at New Life Unity Church and continues more than a decade of devotion to facilitating classes in A Course in Miracles.

Book preview

Introduction

This book is about finding a better way. It's about rising above the battleground we call Earth and opening our minds to a radically different view. Based on A Course in Miracles (ACIM), it will challenge the reader to re-evaluate everything he thinks he knows about the world and its Creator.

When people talk about ACIM as impractical at best, heretical at worst, my husband, Harry, likes to remind them that what we are currently doing—our rationale and approach to living in peace on earth—is not only not working, it's disastrous. This is a book about reclaiming the happiness and dominion over our lives that is our divine inheritance. Like the Prodigal, we have squandered that inheritance. Like the father in the parable, Our Father in Heaven patiently anticipates our return to love and sanity.

When I first thought about writing this book, the simplicity of its message, it came to me that I could actually write it on the backs of 3X5 note cards and hand them out for free at the shopping malls. Then I realized they'd probably all end up in trashcans. After all, everyone knows there are no free rides. Life is complicated and hard, right?

At the outset, you're probably going to heave a more than cynical sigh when I say this, but that decision is entirely up to you. Ultimately, that's the good news. It's the key to the kingdom, the Open sez me! to freedom and joy. Because God loves us so deeply and so completely, it is His good pleasure to give us the kingdom. God created a perfect world and gave its sovereignty to us with a single caveat: Love! Love the Lord with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. We don't need affirmations or crystals or secret formulas to manifest peace, joy, health, and abundance. In God's world, like attracts like. Love establishes peace and happiness. Love attracts abundance. Love even, science has recently revealed, manifests good health. As Dr. Eben Alexander noted in his recent New York Times bestseller, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife, Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything. A scientist himself, Dr. Alexander further adds, that this is "not only the single most important emotional truth in the universe, but also the single most important scientific truth as well."

Yet we've taken this truth, so plain and clear a child instinctively gets it, and whipped it into something so complicated it seems to take a PhD to unravel.

Genesis 1:26 says, "Let us create man in our own image, and let him have dominion." This passage affirms two things: 1) we were created to be co-creators, endowed with innate knowledge of the creative process; and 2) we were given dominion of our world—mastery through Divine Mind, where all images begin as an idea and proceed to manifestation.

Though the foundation for the viewpoint in this book stands on Jesus' teachings, in both the New Testament and A Course in Miracles, I consider this by no means an authoritative text. This is the sharing of one woman's attempt to understand God's creation, an attempt that took me through the study of many religions and beliefs and, ironically, to a PhD in Divine Metaphysics that I now understand was an amusing and completely unnecessary exercise. It is a compilation of essays I have written and excerpts from talks I have given from 2003 through 2012; consequently, you will see some overlapping in its messages. I hope those who read it will find elements that have meaning to them.

The One Rule Life Plan

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 22: 37-40

We all come into the world a just a hunka burnin' love. Our parents did. Saddam Hussein did. The infamous shooters did. At first, we love everyone and everything we see. But all too soon, the indoctrination begins. Though we're told God is love, we're simultaneously told His world is a dangerous and forbidding place. We're cautioned that sharp objects can poke out our eyes. Dogs bite, and strangers are to be avoided. We're taught that, for some shadowy reason, we are all deeply flawed and in need of constant correction. If something brings us pleasure, we know straight away it's a sin. The deeper the pleasure, the darker the sin. Though we all sense something's dreadfully wrong with this picture, the few who question or buck the system generally find themselves shunned by the pack.

Accordingly, we begin the task of beating our various pegs into the tight little holes that comprise our particular society. Many of us go to jobs we dislike every day. We stand around at cocktail parties in ties that choke us and high heel shoes that paralyze our feet, pretending to be interested in the ramblings of people we don't know. Why? We want to fit in, to be loved and accepted. We buy a host of treasures to keep up with the Joneses, possessions that consume our lives with endless chores—repairing, refueling, dusting, and upgrading. Back and forth we race to work each day, collecting green papers and silver disks to buy a love we can't quite find, happiness we have little or no time to enjoy.

In this process of conforming, what we unlearn is our true nature. We forget we are created in the likeness of our Father/Mother God, Who is Omnipotent Love. In place of the truth of us, we learn suspicion, competition, fear, and guilt. We learn smallness and victimhood. Then one day, we suddenly stop in our tracks. We're uptight and angry, and we don't know why. For me, the pain got so severe I was either going to have to slit my wrists or find another way.

I spent so many years of my life angry and despondent, it's a miracle my husband didn't throw me out the door. But, miraculously, he didn't. I can still remember his words—words that penetrated to my soul—"I'm on your side, babe. I love you. How can I help you? Not: I don't have to take this crap. But: I love you. How can I help you?" The words were a lifeline to the forgotten Christ in me.

One night, back in the early days of our marriage, in indescribable misery over something—I forget exactly what—I slipped out into the backyard of our well-to-do home in our well-to-do neighborhood and screamed at the top of my lungs: God, help me!

Well . . . then the doors began to open. Not the neighbors' doors. God's doors. The moment I called in earnest, God sent a virtual taxi. It is said when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Mine happened to be in the form of a Unity minister named Randolph Alwin Wilkinson. How I discovered him is a story in itself, but the first time I walked into his sanctuary, I knew I was on my way home. For the first time, someone behind a pulpit was saying something that made perfect sense: God is Love, and Love does not deal in fire and brimstone.

Divine Spirit does not judge. He doesn't keep score, He doesn't punish, and He hasn't gone to sleep on the job. Our Creator set the universe up to ensure that everyone could experience his heart's desires—no matter how outlandish—without extinguishing himself in the process. Now, I call that love, and here's the startling truth: God made a perfect world, and that world is still exactly as He created it! We swim in God's love and abundance like fish in water, all the while imagining we are dying of thirst.

What God creates, no man can put asunder. Most of us agree on that point. So where is that perfect world? It's certainly not the one we see on the six o'clock news. Flawed and sinful people made that disaster, right? Stop and give that idea some serious thought. God created all that is—and God does not make flawed stuff. Then how do we justify the discord between the belief that 1) God is Love, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent and 2) that His creation has somehow gone to hell in a microchip?

I'll offer you a possibility to ponder. What we witness on the six o'clock news, Biblically speaking, is seen through a glass darkly, which we call human perception. The phenomenon is a God-given learning tool so just and so effective no mortal mind could have conceived it. Here's how it works: We each see a reflection of our own inner world, its predominant love or fear projected outward, morphed into a virtual reality we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. The sensations are so real—like the nightmare that sets our hearts thundering—they feel like the God's honest truth. But they aren't. In many ways, it's like the relatively recent invention we call the virtual reality helmet. You can wear it on your head and fly a jet or walk through the streets of Hong Kong or Katmandu. What's so cool about the arrangement is the wearer can experience whatever he chooses without leaving the comfort of home and without the slightest danger.

Sound a little too bizarre? Think of it this way. Is it any more bizarre than the fact that we can pick up a little metal and plastic gizmo and see and talk with someone on the other side of the globe in real time? A beam of light can cut steel or perform surgery. A gazillion blades of grass and leaves and flowers unfold around us in mind-boggling perfection—from tiny brown seeds with a divine code—every second of every day. We experience such marvels day in and day out and never question how incredibly unbelievable they are. A scientist could explain the processes—genetic codes, how electrical impulses converge to form sounds and pictures. But the truth is not even scientists understand the why. It's a miracle. Like us. Without the power of God, our wires and transformers are just so much rubber and metal, our nervous systems and cardiovascular systems are just so much flesh and gunk.

Yet, the kingdom of heaven is within us! Quite literally. We come into the world possessing everything we'll ever need. Ironically, however, where do we look when we're in trouble? To books and manuals, ministers and gurus, Mount Sinai, Machu Picchu. Anywhere and everywhere but within. "Knock and it shall be opened to you." The operative word is you. We don't need interpreters to communicate with our own Father. We don't have to be learned or intellectual. The only thing we must learn to do is to be still and listen to Love, directing each and every one of us in our very own hearts twenty-eight hours a day, eight days a week.

Jesus told us if we would only follow the one Great Law, also known as The Golden Rule, all the things, the trimmings, would be added. He also taught us that of our own, we can do nothing. But aligned with our Creator, there's nothing we cannot do.

So let's take a closer look at this Law, upon which all else in heaven and earth rests. Jesus taught that we come to the Kingdom hand in hand with our brother or not at all. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Who, exactly, is our neighbor? Are we required to love the terrorist or the pedophile? We certainly don't have to love what they do, but yes, we are asked to seek the Christ in all. Jesus, lovingly called the Wayshower in traditional Christianity, modeled this kind of love. Though he sometimes got upset by people's behaviors—the moneychangers and Pharisees are two notable examples—the very foundation of Jesus' teaching was inclusiveness. He knew the so-called sinner could not be shunned or punished into realizing the Christ within.

Specifically, the Wayshower restated the law of the Old Testament in this way: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

Jesus took the basic axiom of love and made the understanding of its application more easily grasped through his entertaining parables and uncompromising directives. Judge not that ye be not judged. Here the master taught the Law of Compensation, which regulates all interchange in the universe. Simply stated, it means what goes around, comes around. Give love, receive love. Give anything else . . . stand by.

As you believe, Jesus said, so shall it be to you. This is no airy-fairy New Age stuff. Quantum physics has finally confirmed what the spiritual masters have taught for eons: We make the world we see by the nature of our thoughts.

We like to say seeing is believing. In actuality, however, believing is seeing. If I believe Jim is an unstable, one-way jerk, that's what he'll be for me. I'll find all the evidence I need to confirm that fact. On the other hand, if I see Jim through my Christ eyes, what I will see is a warm, caring person who is fearful and crying out for love.

Cowboy-humorist Will Rodgers once said, I never met a man I didn't like. They should have given him a divinity degree. With his characteristic simplicity and humility, Rodgers intrinsically grasped the greatest secret of all time: When we see through the eyes of love,