There was a story I read in the news many years ago that I still think of a few times a year, particularly in the summer when it’s hot. And yesterday it popped into my mind during a class. We were talking about guilt and the pain of making self-judgments.

The story I read in the news years ago was of a man who had forgotten to drop his one-year-old twins at daycare on his way to work and they perished in the hot car while he was at work. A few years before that, it was a woman who had done a similar thing. Loving and caring parents who simply had forgotten they had their children with them in the car. Perhaps the children fell asleep on the drive, and the parents had so much on their mind, and they forgot to drop them off at daycare and went straight to work instead.

These parents were obviously exhausted. Working full-time with a commute while raising babies is, I think ALL would agree, very demanding and challenging. It would be easy for some to accuse the parents of a crime and to judge them, but I cannot. My heart goes out to them. I bless them every time I think of them and when I hear and see the reminders from my own car to “remember to look in the back seat.”

There are many spiritual teachings that say that no one can die before their time. I have faith in that. I don’t believe in accidents, random occurrences or luck. That’s not the Universe I live in.

No matter how chaotic and random things seem, I live in an orderly Universe that is ordered by a vast, completely loving Intelligence in which we do have free will. Yet, as A Course in Miracles teaches us, the script is already written.

Perhaps in one version of this man’s script, he makes choices that lead him to go to bed earlier and so he’s better rested and not on auto-pilot and his children survive. I don’t know what anything is for, but I do absolutely KNOW that everything works together for our good and there are NO EXCEPTIONS. Although, of course, it seems impossible to see how there could be any good in an innocent child’s death.

What I see in my own experience of life is that we can undo our negative beliefs, which helps us to make more loving choices, which bring better results and opens up the higher vibrational aspects of our script and eliminates the more painful lessons.

ACIM clearly tells us, “There is no need to learn through pain. And gentle lessons are acquired joyously, and are remembered gladly. What gives you happiness you want to learn and not forget. It is not this you would deny. Your question is whether the means by which this course is learned will bring to you the joy it promises. If you believed it would, the learning of it would be no problem. You are not a happy learner yet because you still remain uncertain that vision gives you more than judgment does, and you have learned that both you cannot have.” T-21.I.3.

Every moment of every day, we decide whether to serve the ego or the Light.

It’s our free will to choose.

We can make loving choices our unloving choices.

We can learn through pain or Joy.

We are the deciders. That’s why I like to stick together and be in a supportive and loving community of like-minded souls who are doing this work together, helping each other to be kind to ourselves and to remember to laugh.

NEW ACIM PODCAST EPISODE: my topic is Choosing Heaven on Earth. ACIM teaches us that we can choose heaven or hell – it’s our decision. In this week’s episode, I share how we can help ourselves out of the low vibration of guilt and shame and live at a higher vibration.  It’s not natural for us to suffer.