God's Will for you is perfect happiness. Why should you choose to go against His Will? The part that He has saved for you to take in working out His plan is given you that you might be restored to what He wills. This part is as essential to His plan as to your happiness. Your joy must be complete to let His plan be understood by those to whom He sends you. They will see their function in your shining face, and hear God calling to them in your happy laugh.

You are indeed essential to God's plan. Without your joy, His joy is incomplete. Without your smile, the world cannot be saved. WpI.100.2./3.

Some students, after working with the material for some time feel dejected believing the Course is asking them, to give up everything they believe will make them happy. In reality the Course is saying that sacrifice will gain us nothing. Sure our investment in exterior things would eventually fall away as we begin to realise that our happiness has nothing to do with anything outside ourselves, but those exterior things or relationships could remain in our lives. We would simply just look on them differently.

Recently we received a letter from a young Miracle student (Virginia: We shall call her.) telling us about how depressed she was feeling. She had left the city and moved to the country. Even though in debt, she had not sought a paying job, but instead had taken on some charity work. She felt the Course was saying she should not be in a special relationship or even marry. Although she loved children and wanted children of her own one day, she now felt that she should give up the idea as she now considered that children were `miscreations' as the Course would describe them. Her main concern was that all this turmoil going on in her mind was making her feel miserable although she described her normal personality as "very happy, carefree and loving."

Dear Virginia,

Thanks for your letter yesterday and for giving us the opportunity of reminding ourselves that we all need cheering up at times.

I have not trouble empathising with you and can relate to what you are feeling, not in the same form of course but certainly in content. I experienced a major 'dark night of the souls' experience only six months ago which lasted six weeks and during the six years I have been studying the Course, many other periods of doubt about the purpose of my life. When you think about it, you realise that a major mind changing process such as A Course in Miracles® must shake us up and cause resistance to question all the "values that we hold". Our depression is a manifestation of that resistance.

Our egos often trick us into over- reacting to our changing set of values, making us feel guilty, lost and depressed. This is understandable as its very existence is being threatened. Jesus would never ask us to sacrifice something we think we want in the belief that to do so would make us holy (which we are already). He is merely asking us to remove our investment in external things as a source of happiness. The Course is not asking us to live a monastic life, quite the opposite in fact. Once we truly know that we can never seek outside ourselves and find lasting happiness, we really can "live in this world but be not of it".

The Course tells us in the text that everybody on earth has formed special relationships, in fact that is what attracted us here in the first place. If we run away from them we will delay the opportunity of the transforming our special relationships into holy relationships, which is the process the Course advocates as a prerequisite for the attainment of peace.

Nothing we do in this world means anything. Our role is to teach love instead of fear regardless of what we are `doing'. So, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a job, having relationships, getting married, having sex or bringing babies into the world, providing at some level you understand that none of them can make you happy.

Happiness comes only from within and is extended by joining with the mind of another brother. I assure you things will start to improve and keep getting better. The purpose of A Course in Miracles® is not to make you more miserable: only the ego can do this.

You can be sure that if you are nor completely happy it is because you believe you are being asked to do something against your will and not in your best interests. But your will and God's Will are the same and His will for you is perfect happiness.

The Course does not single out the having of Children as `miscreations' as everything in form is a miscreation in that it is not of God. Children are of Course Sons of God just as we are. Our bringing them into the world gives form to their (and our) desires and gives us both the opportunity of learning whatever lessons they and we came to experience. It also becomes a new special relationship, which gives us the opportunity of changing to a holy relationship.

On page 20 of the text (1st Ed.) we are told that denial of the existence of the body is a particularly unworthy form of denial. Also in the text on page 109 (1st Ed.) it says that "The Holy Spirit teaches you to use what the ego has made, to teach the opposite of what the ego has `learned".

I love the paragraph on page 322 (1st Ed.) of the workbook where Jesus says, "Let this review be then your gift to me. For this alone I need; that you will hear the words I speak, and give them to the world. You are my voice, my eyes, my feet, my hands through which I save the world. The Self from which I call to you is but your own. To Him we go together. Take your brother's hand, for this is not a way we walk alone."

What you `do' in this world is of no consequence but how you think is vital. When you see everything through the eyes of forgiveness you are on your way home and you can't fail to make it.

Bill McDonald