“There is a beauty in the innocence of those who haven’t seen enough of the world to know anything but light. There’s an even greater beauty in the innocence of those who have seen so much of the world that they have seen darkness, yet then chosen light.

Even when we feel we have turned our backs on God, it’s important to remember that He hasn’t turned His back on us. He cannot, for love is incapable of turning its back on its creations. The point is for us to choose love today, even if we didn’t choose it yesterday. God didn’t look at Moses and say, “What?! You expect me to use you after the mistakes you made?” Rather, it wasn’t long after Moses made a huge mistake that God called him to greatness.

Grazing his father-in-law’s flocks one day, Moses saw an angel appearing in a bush that was burning but not consumed by the fire. Angels, as defined in A Course in Miracles, are “thoughts of God.” So Moses in a way was no different from anyone else taking a walk through nature, or “tending the flocks” by helping people in some capacity or another and having an epiphany. An awakening.

A burst of enlightened understanding. A sense of knowing. This is not a different kind of inner knowing than what you or I or anyone else might have. God speaking to Moses was not an event that is different from the way He speaks to any of us; it’s a symbol for the way He speaks to all of us.

And what did Moses hear from God? First, he was told to take off his sandals. The sandals are a symbol for that which touches the earth. We are told to approach God without our sandals, for the space wherein God dwells is holy ground. We surrender our worldly concerns there and come to Him with nothing but our open hearts.

We are constantly distracted today by ultimately meaningless things, all of them binding us to the regions of the earth. A twenty-four-hour news cycle, outrageous politics and world events, ridiculous gossip—all clutter our consciousness and keep us bound to the world of suffering. In approaching God, we must take off our sandals. We must “clear our heads.”

Excerpt From: Williamson, Marianne. “Tears to Triumph.”