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There once was a high school teacher who was known for his testing policy. During tests and quizzes students were allowed to ask him for as much help as they needed. Those students who asked the teacher for help always got top grades, even if they were not known to be good students.

After one particularly challenging pop quiz, a straight-A student who had consistently refused to ask the teacher for help confronted him about his policy. The earnest student believed that asking for help was cheating and that despite studying very hard he was only getting Cs and Ds while all of the students who asked for help had top scores. “I’m so glad we are having this conversation!” the teacher exclaimed. “I have been keeping a close eye on you, but I can’t figure out how you are doing it. You should be completely failing my class, but you’re not. Either you are really smart, really lucky, or a really good cheater. Regardless of how you are pulling it off, whenever you are ready, please ask me for help. That’s why I’m here.”

Secrets of the Story

Our Divine Parent does not conform to the arbitrary rules and structures that we have developed to manage ourselves, our relationships, our organizations, and our institutions. God is doing God’s thing and will not stop doing it just because people disagree with it or don’t like it.

Our Heavenly Parent really wants to help us, but won’t unless we ask for that help from our souls. The straight-A student wouldn’t ask the teacher for help because he judged (wrongly) that it was cheating. When I consider how I have been blessed by the Power of God’s Love over the past two decades of my life, I have often thought of myself as “cheating” because my mind still struggles with the idea of happiness being related to achievement that is earned and deserved. In my actual experience God has rewarded me based on the desire of my soul which has nothing to do with earning or deserving anything. It is all about God’s gifting of Unconditional Love to me.

Humanity has created a world that is almost completely out of harmony with God’s World, I call this temporary reality the “fabricated world of human invention.” Ironically, it constitutes most of what people are referring to when they talk about the “real world.” The rules of the fabricated world of human invention are mostly about achieving goals related to appearance, achievement, and affluence (Days of Awe and Wonder, Marcus Borg, p. 200). I have been richly blessed in more ways than I can count, and all I did to receive these blessings was to ask for God’s Love in prayer. That’s it. I don’t deserve the good things I have received in my life. I haven’t earned them. I’m just a guy who got really desperate and when I asked God for help in prayer, I received it and have been receiving it ever since.

While people may be rewarded for intelligence, expertise, physical prowess, attractiveness, wealth, power, influence, shrewdness, talent, or violent tendencies in the fabricated world of human invention, The Source of Life rewards people based on the requests of their souls in prayer (Matthew 6:6). No one who prays in this way can brag about rewards and accomplishments because all he has done is ask and receive. It takes no special skill or talent. It’s so simple. Anyone can do it! (Ephesians 2: 8-9)

The straight-A student wanted to define fairness based on beliefs he accepted as true from his society. God’s fairness is very different from human fairness. God’s fairness is based in the fact that every single soul has the exact same ability to ask for and to receive the gift of God’s Love at any time, in any place, and under any circumstance. The teacher in the story offered every student help. That is fair. The one who was used to winning the educational game on his terms was now losing because he thought the game was about achievement through personal effort. His pride in (and identification with) his previous intellectual achievements blinded him to the truth that we all need God’s help if we are to experience true success. This is part of the dynamic at work in the teaching that “the last will be first and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). Success in the fabricated world does not equal success in God’s World. Many people who consider themselves to be winners in the fabricated world have already found (or will soon find) that their worldly successes count for next to nothing in God’s World of Unconditional Love.

The fabricated world of human invention is all about games with rules that create and sustain winners and losers in their respective roles. Everyone can win in God’s World – there’s plenty of real success to go around – but for that to happen, people need to play God’s game which is receiving God’s Unconditional Love and giving unconditional love to others. The fabricated world is all about conditional love: love that is given and received based on people’s ideas of what is deserved either through inheritance or achievement. While it is possible to experience some degree of success in the fabricated world of human invention and God’s World in this life, there are way too many people who seek success in the fabricated world at the expense of achieving success in God’s World. Indeed, what good is it to gain the (fabricated) world and give up your soul? (Mark 8:36) God’s Love saves – no form of success in the fabricated world ever can or ever will.

Another way to look at the straight-A student is that he wanted to play the game his way and thought that the teacher should see things his way. God doesn’t play like people do. God Loves Unconditionally. God is not going to change the game to conform to people’s expectations, to make people feel better, or to feed their egos. God knows exactly what each and every single person truly needs better than we do. The sooner each one of us really, really gets that, the sooner everything gets better.

Life is so much more than what can be found in the fabricated world. God’s World is a really big place that goes so far beyond anything that humans are capable of imagining. There are so many amazing levels and layers of reality for people to experience, but they cannot be accessed through one’s mind or body. These are places that only the soul can go, realities that only the soul can experience, perceptions that only the soul can have.

May you be inspired to seek those amazing places in God’s World with all of your heart. If you seek and persist (Luke 18:1), you will find, and when you find, you (like me) will be utterly amazed at what has been hiding in plain sight all along (Gospel of Thomas: Sayings 2, 5, and 113).

I look forward to seeing you soon in God’s World!