"As a progressive and evolving being, man is where he is that
he may learn that he may grow; and as he learns the spiritual lesson which any
circumstance contains for him, it passes away and gives place to other
circumstances." –As A
Man Thinketh
It has taken me a long time to be able to look at a problem I'm
having as a necessary spiritual lesson. To be frank, I'm still not always
really excited to be enduring the pain and frustration that negative
circumstances usually cause. Some days I'd like to "play hooky" and
skip the lesson.
But as I look back at my life, it is easy to see that the
times when my wisdom and understanding grew to new levels; those times when I
approached becoming the person I long to be; it was always the times that
followed negative circumstances. The greatest growth you're going to
have is going to come from the negative circumstance you have today that
sometimes seems too overwhelming, too big to scale.
Writing in Byways of Blessedness,
James Allen is strong in his call for us to embrace our circumstances. "Let a person rejoice when he is
confronted with obstacles, for it means that he has reached the
end of some particular line of indifference or folly, and is now called upon to
summon up all his energy and intelligence in order to extricate himself, and to
find a better way; that the powers within him are crying out for greater
freedom, for enlarged exercise and scope.
"No situation can be difficult of itself; it is the lack of
insight into its intricacies, and the want of wisdom in dealing with it, which
give rise to the difficulty. Immeasurable, therefore, is the gain of a
difficulty transcended."
Maybe that explains why it
sometimes seems that I can't shake a particular problem, or I have one that
keeps rearing its ugly head. Instead of fighting it, I need to jump in and gain
the insight and wisdom to handle it. Then it would be gone, and I would be
ready for the next lesson—only stronger, both in spirit and in wisdom!
And that's worth thinking
about.
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