Willingness Leads to Miracles
Offered by anonymous
For almost 5 years, I had no contact with my niece.
It began with something that, at the time, felt completely justified to me. My niece told her mother, my sister, that she would not allow her to see her granddaughter unless she received several vaccinations. My sister was devastated. I stood beside my sister and supported her in refusing. When she ultimately chose to be vaccinated, I could not accept her decision.
But rather than simply disagreeing with my sister or my niece, I made the decision to cut my niece out of my life completely.
I stopped acknowledging her. I acknowledged nothing about her daughter, my grandniece. I asked no questions, sent no messages, offered no congratulations. In my mind, she was essentially dead to me.
I can see that now with a clarity I did not have then.
At the time, I believed I was standing for something important. I believed I was protecting my sister. I believed I was justified. But underneath all of that was judgment—and judgment had become a wall.
Then I met A Course in Miracles.
I began with the Workbook lessons my first year. I thought I was finished. But six months later, I found myself beginning the lessons again, this time following along with Nouk and Coreen on YouTube. Nouk and Coreen’s amazing skill of “unpacking and going deeper” with the lessons catapulted me into another orbit. I remembered a lesson where Nouk spoke of the importance of not doing The Course alone and working with a miracle buddy and to “stop right now and sign up for the TTC below”. I signed up immediately and started the TTC with Julie in early June. Julie is a wonderful facilitator who creates an open space for the alchemy of it all to unfold. She allows us to be informed by each other’s experiences, struggles, and successes while holding us firmly within the uncompromising framework of The Course. It was during this timeframe that something was softening and shifting as I could sense it in the architecture of my mind.
With that said, back in March of this year, three months before TTC, my niece’s younger sister, another niece whom I absolutely love, suffered a sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 30. She sustained a serious brain injury, her heart was failing, and for more than four months our family lived through what felt like an endless nightmare.
I poured myself into helping her. I moved mountains. I did everything I could.
And yet, somewhere in the middle of all of this I became aware that I was still completely ignoring her sister.
Then, on Monday, August 3, I woke up and had a thought come to me from nowhere:
What the hell are you doing?
There was no plan. No analysis. No decision-making process. I didn’t sit down and determine that it was time to reconcile. I didn’t think through what I would say. I simply had an overwhelming sense that I needed to call her.
I had no idea what I would say. In fact, I told myself that if she didn’t answer, I would leave it alone. If I got voicemail, I would hang up.
She answered.
And what followed was one of the most extraordinary conversations I have ever had.
I told her that I knew she had probably experienced my absence as something like being pushed off a cliff. I acknowledged that I had essentially disappeared from her life without giving her a real explanation or a chance to understand what had happened.
I apologized.
There was no defense. No explanation about vaccines. No attempt to justify myself. No argument about who was right.
I simply acknowledged what I had done.
I also told her that, while I had been so completely invested in helping her sister, I could see how it must have looked to her, that I was capable of pouring all of this love and attention into her sister while acting as though she did not exist.
She then thanked me for everything I had done for her sister. She told me she was glad to hear from me and that she had understood better.
We ended the conversation talking about seeing each other again.
I will meet my grandniece, who will soon be four years old. And I will meet her baby brother, who will join the family in October.
Four years of silence and suddenly there was a future where I could connect with her again.
I did not make this happen through force.
I did not figure it out.
I did not reason my way into forgiveness.
I simply became willing.
The past had told me who my niece was. It had told me what she had done. It had told me what she deserved. It had told me that my judgment was justified.
And then, for one instant, I was willing to lay all of that down. I stopped defending my perception of the past.
I didn’t know I was doing it. I only knew that I needed to call her.
Looking back through the lens of The Course, I can see something else.
I had thought I was withholding love from my niece.
But I was actually withholding love from myself.
The wall I built around her was a wall I built within my own mind. I thought I was keeping her out, but I was keeping myself imprisoned in the judgment.
And the Holy Instant did not require her to change.
It did not require my sister to change.
It did not require anyone to admit that I was wrong or that they were right.
The circumstances hadn’t changed.
The past hadn’t changed.
My niece hadn’t changed.
I changed my mind about what I was seeing.
And that was enough.
The willingness came before the conversation.
It came before the apology.
It came before the reconciliation.
And that is the miracle.
The miracle wasn’t that my niece forgave me.
The miracle was that I finally became willing to let go of the version of her I had made in my mind.
Just weeks after beginning TTC, I experienced something I had been reading and talking about for years, the experience of what is possible when the mind lets go.
It’s been roughly two weeks since this phone call. When we chat now it’s as if the past never happened.
Eternally grateful