Joseph Baker started studying the Course in 1993. He lives near Detroit, Michigan.
His journey with the Course in his words:
The Course came to me at a point of crisis and renewal in my late teens. Its coming was momentous. Soon after being introduced, I emptied my savings account to purchase a used car that allowed me to travel to a Course study group at a Unity church near my college campus. The Course helped shape my worldview from my earliest time with it. Still, my reading and interest waned through various stages of life in the decades of spiritual seeking that followed.
This changed in 2012 after a health crisis. I turned to the Course in a way I never had before. What began then was an often-difficult process of accepting God in a new way. A way I hadn’t in all those years of seeking.
I learned to take an active role in my study and practice of the Course. I did this with the support of other students and teachers. For several years I met weekly with a personal Course teacher who urged careful interpretation. I shed assumptions about the Course I picked up in various places along the way. I was taught to constantly examine and improve my practice habits and meditation. I was modeled techniques for guidance-seeking, prayer, and turning to Jesus. This was a real turnaround for me. I have learned to take the Course into my day, applying its words to upsets, where before I would unconsciously hold onto a grievance. I have learned to be a disciplined meditator.
With firm footing in my path, I have discovered the healing, and guidance that I long sought. Yet it feels as though the journey is only beginning, the vision still unfolding. I see the Course as a path of immeasurable healing and transformative power. It can set the world ablaze in love and teach us never to fear. It is a message of urgency, of ancient memory, and I feel so blessed to share it.
Kathy Chomitz started studying the Course in 2003. She lives in the Okanogan Valley in British Columbia, Canada.
Her journey with the Course in her words:
I began a spiritual journey as a teenager. I was always aware of God and my attraction to Him. I was irresistibly drawn to seeking Him out. I explored my Christian roots in many denominations, always ending up feeling incomplete. I searched other traditions as well with the same results.
I found myself drawn to the Course because it was being mentioned in “New Age” books I was reading and bought the only copy in our small downtown bookstore. It remained basically untouched until in 2003 an emotional crisis had me scrambling for help. I was desperate for and crying out for a master/teacher to help me find the way to complete healing. I could not believe that if God created me, I was not already perfect. I thought that there must be a way to gain that perfection that did not include some outside interference with medication. I thought that it was preposterous to believe that God would create something that needed to be “fixed!”! There was A Course in Miracles sitting on my shelf like a light was shining from it. I opened the book and started to read. It was like I was hit by lightning! I knew my heartfelt prayer for help had been answered. I had my teacher and my path.
I was quite committed but mostly on my own with The Course until another crisis in 2009 when my 16-year-old daughter was given a maximum 36 hours to live due to acute liver failure. At that moment I knew that I did not know anything and placed the whole situation into God’s hands. I knew that whatever the outcome, even if she died, she and we, her family, would all be safe and protected. She actually did survive and did not need a transplant. This situation deepened my commitment to the Course.
A sequence of serendipitous events led me to finding a teacher and I was given the foundation from which to study and practice the Course, looking only to its teaching in order to interpret what it says and trying to use every situation in which I find myself as the place to practice its ideas and concepts in order to bring God’s message of love and equality.
I have felt a deep need to bring this teaching out of my study room and into the world in a more active way. I long to bring Jesus’ message of absolute and consistent love to all people regardless of how they seem to be behaving. I see my role as akin to a shepherd, guiding and helping others to accept God’s Word, His radical love and inclusion, so they can also share it with their brothers.