Whenever anything begins to disintegrate your life with Jesus Christ, turn to him at once and ask him to establish rest. Never allow anything that is causing dis-peace to remain. Treat every disturbance as something to wrestle against, not as something to endure. Say to the Lord, “Establish your consciousness in me.” Christ-consciousness will come, self-consciousness will go, and he will be all in all.

If you allow self-consciousness to continue, by slow degrees it will awaken self-pity, and self-pity is satanic. The self-pitying person thinks along these lines: “No one understands me; I’m owed an apology; I have to keep making my point until other people accept it.” Leave other people alone. Ask the Lord to give you Christ-consciousness, and he will steady you until your completeness in him is absolute.

The complete life is the life of the child. The child of God is not conscious of the will of God, because the child is the will of God. When you are consciously conscious, something is wrong; it is the sick person who knows what health is. If you are consciously asking God, “What is your will?” it’s a sign that you have deviated, however slightly, from his will. The child of God never prays to be conscious that God answers prayer. The child of God is restfully certain that God always does answer prayer.

Never try to overcome self-consciousness using common sense. You will only succeed in strengthening it. You must do what Jesus says: “Come to me . . . and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Wherever Jesus comes, he establishes rest—the perfect rest of activity that is unconscious of itself.

Wisdom from Oswald

We are not fundamentally free; external circumstances are not in our hands, they are in God’s hands, the one thing in which we are free is in our personal relationship to God. We are not responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us, or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be.  Conformed to His Image, 354 L