Are you searching for a meaning to your life? Does little make sense as you see the apparent unfairness of it all? Good people who reach a time in their lives when they can finally look forward to a few years of relaxation after retiring and then find themselves struck down by a fatal illness. Others where it appears nothing ever goes right; they seem to have one problem after another whereas other people, who seem less deserving sail through life without any problems at all. How do we make sense of all this?
When we look at the trials of life and the varying impact they seem to have on different people, I find it helps to try to remember four things. First, we learn far more quickly and effectively from our mistakes and difficulties. Second, life is eternal and anything that happens in our earthly lives can often only make sense when viewed from the perspective of eternity. Third, we make assumptions about how other people are affected by certain events and they are usually superficial. Fourth, we are what we think. Some people seem to go through their lives expecting the worst to happen, whereas others are always expecting the best.
I want to examine these in reverse order. If you are always or mostly, expecting the worst to happen and things to go wrong, then you attract to yourself negative forces that bring about what you fear and expect. If you are positive in your outlook, always look for the best in others and expect the best for yourself, positive forces will be attracted and the universe will do everything to ensure positive things happen to you. It is not easy at first but if we can train ourselves to think positive uplifting thoughts, even when faced with difficulties, bad things will not happen to us.
It is all too easy to assume when a person appears, on the surface, to be unscathed by a particular event, that they have not been affected at all. Often this is just not true but they have been able to hide its effect from the outside world. Inside it is often a very different story. If we lead our lives assuming earthly life is all there is, we will constantly be misled about most things. How can we make any sense of the comparison of one person born into abject poverty and having to endure a constant struggle for existence with one born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, except by realising earth life is a very small portion of our eternal lives? If, as I am certain, life is eternal, two things follow. There must be a purpose to all aspects of life, especially earth life and the probability is that we choose to come to the earth precisely at the time and into the family we have. The American poet, Robert Frost says it is “for some good perceived”*. It may even be the case that the “silver spoon” person has to overcome much greater challenges to achieve spiritual progress than the one born in poverty.
I think it was Thomas Edison who said he learned far more from his unsuccessful experiments to invent an electric lamp, than from the one when he succeeded. So it is with our individual lives. We learn far more lessons when we make mistakes than when we get everything right. I firmly believe that we come to earth to make mistakes and in doing so and learning (maybe not from the first mistake) from them, we eventually make good. The wonderful thing is we do not get just a single opportunity to profit from our mistakes. If we fail to learn, then we will be presented with different circumstances that will help us learn the same lesson we failed to learn the last time. Even if we fail to learn in our earthly life we will be presented with opportunity after opportunity in our future spirit life, to learn what we failed to learn on earth.
*“The Trial By Existence”
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