Part of receiving God’s accepting love is to accept God’s or Earth’s unconditional love for us just as we are. We live in a world that injects us with unacceptable feelings to encourage us to buy solutions to our need to be accepted. It may be the latest car, the latest fashion, the latest neighborhood, or the latest gadget. They all try to make us feel unacceptable as we are and just one step from acceptance by the purchase of their solution. But no entity has had a greater hard sell than the Christian church. Pitching total depravity at birth and the fear of eternal ****ation at death, the church brought emperors to their knees and created ongoing misery for millions. Yet this same Christian tradition carries within it the good news of our acceptance that doesn’t rely on human effort. “Just as I am” became a favorite hymn of many. It was written in 1836 by Charlotte Elliott, who was disabled at age thirty, and published in her Invalid’s Hymn Book. Yet this free gift of acceptance never lasts too long before new conditions are added by church leaders. Make a specific personal decision, explain life in a certain way, and other human ideas become the door into finding that acceptance, the door controlled by the church. Even the most enlightened two-universe Christians must struggle to remove all barriers that humans create to mediate and control the unconditional love of God. For one-universe Christians even the assumption by two-universe Christians of a second universe is just such a barrier. For one-universe Christians it is far simpler to say that every human being is born acceptable just as they are. We can choose to become unacceptable but there is no unacceptable givenness to who we are. To rephrase our hymn: “Just as I am accepted free, for Earth loves all, yes even me. So I do choose the needs I see to be the place, I help, I help.”
