"The gift of grace is the awareness that the all-knowing Teacher of all teachers is with you always" (Leddy and Randolph Schmelig Steps in Self-Knowledge 140).
"Must one experience evil in order to appreciate good?... Does the child that burns its hand on a hot stove have a larger consciousness of health when the hand is healed? Has it learned more about stoves? Unnumbered illustrations of this kind might be given to show that by experimentation we learn the relations existing between things in the phenomenal world. But if we apply this rule to sciences that are governed by absolute rules, it becomes evident that there is no necessity for knowing the negative. To become proficient in mathematics it is not necessary that one make errors. The more closely one follows the rules in exact sciences, the more easily and successfully one makes the demonstrations" (The Twelve Powers of Man 42).
"Grace transcends all toiling effort, all condemnation and self-condemnation; does not know wrong, nor resistance to wrong, nor punishment for wrong, but shines steadily on, the glory of God's love manifest; eases all our struggle, stills all strife in our life, comforts all our sorrow, wipes away all our tears—knows nothing of such things and erases them from our mind and heart when we are receptive to its distilled loveliness" (E.R.A. Crichton No Mutiny From the Bounty: Your Miracle of Grace 107).
"Grace gives God, not hardship. Struggle is not the way to realization of God, since in Him there is no contending. Crying is not the high road to laughter. Sometime the cry must cease before the laugh begins" (E.R.A. Crichton No Mutiny From the Bounty: Your Miracle of Grace 106).
"Man arrives at consciousness of truth about anything in one of two ways: by means of the slow, often struggling, ' always hard way of overcoming the negative concepts in consciousness by just mental denial of the negative and affirmation of the positive; or by choice of the speedy, airborne, nostress way of acknowledging that, through Christ Jesus' truth within, the goal of purified soul is already wholly reached. If soul redemption is man's goal, is his soul any the less pure because it's been washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb, rather than by man's own hard scrubbing—divinely mind-washed and heart-washed by His pure consciousness, instead of laboriously worked over by only mental denial and affirmation?" (E.R.A. Crichton No Mutiny From the Bounty: Your Miracle of Grace 106)
The will of God has never been, nor will it ever be, that we learn through suffering. Yes, of course, we grow in wisdom and understanding when we make mistakes and error choices that cause pain and suffering. But learning in this way has nothing to do with God's will. The more we align our choices with divine principle, love, faith, and trust, the less suffering we will encounter. Love, faith, and trust in God are all energies aligned with the nature of our being. When we choose to center ourselves in these energies and live from a consciousness of them, we perpetuate accelerated spiritual growth and learning from the inner teacher, the Holy Spirit, who Jesus said would teach us all things.
