With You Always

Different themes arise as I sit in silence each morning. Today it is the realization of the words spoken by Jesus. “Lo, I am with you always.” At first we take it as the Master talking to his disciples. That is the simplest way to understand it.

Then we move into a truth so profound that it is a wonder we never saw it before. “The I Am awareness is who I am, so how could it ever leave me or forsake me?

But I do feel forsaken and left alone; we all do at times. So what’s that about? That is about our forgetting who we really are. We think we are the body/mind and separate from the spirit. No, the spirit cannot forsake us. It is the element that is eternal.

As I get older and move deeper into the teachings, you might expect me to grow wiser, but that is not the case. I can, however, return more and more to the spiritual insights that have always been available to me.

Vicki is useless to herself and to anyone else. She is a creature of habit and full of weaknesses. But what did Jesus say? “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” A man once wrote that he liked my “strong weaknesses.” I guess he was saying he liked my honesty in admitting to having such deep self-doubt.

An admission of sin is an admission of repentance. And repentance is the act of being born again. Not as a mechanical “Born-Again Christian,” but as a child of God being given all of the chances they need.

Society has no interest in repentance and the church is not into it, either. So what is? The soul that has been wounded so much and so often that it knows its way out of the trap is not up to anyone but God.

The slate can be wiped clean as often as you need it to be. Esoteric Christianity is open to all that seek a deeper meaning to life. It is waiting for you to discover that life on earth is a testing ground, not a playground. Life is about seeing clearly that surrendering to your suffering consciously brings an end to it. For a while, anyway. But we can choose freedom again and again and again.

Vicki Woodyard