THE VOICE OF ETERNITY

Something still isn’t working in your life. You ask yourself, why?

Many teachers would say how your life looks is a manifestation of your strongest intentions. Now, we have to be careful. Do we want to say that a person’s cancer is a manifestation of his deepest intentions? Or that she lost her job because that’s what she wanted?

I think not.

We do not want to ‘blame’ ourselves for the difficulties in our lives, though we may be committed to learning as much as we can about how best to live.

One might frame an illness or the loss of a job or whatever other hardships come our way as opportunities for us to learn. We do all we can to see how me might be responsible, for in doing so we claim whatever dominion we might have over the problems in our lives. In this way we do not forfeit any of our power. And yet, there is only so much we can do.

Suffering, loss, and disappointment are unavoidable. We seem to want one thing, but the universe seems to want something else. What are we to make of these in light of our deepest intentions for ourselves? If I allow that my life has meaning and that maybe all of existence has meaning, though that meaning is unfathomable to me in its entirety, then I can ask, What is the deepest lesson for me to learn from this experience? What is the universe or God trying to teach me? 

In this way we open up to the possibility of an intention bigger than ourselves.

            Though we may never know for sure whether our lives have meaning, we can all live our lives in a way that is deeply meaningful to us. That’s what you are doing as you go deep into what you want, opening to the possibility that you are part of a meaning bigger than yourself, a meaning that will carry you through the hard times. You are opening to the possibility that though you may be here on sealed orders, orders you will never fully comprehend, you are here for a good reason, even when things don't go as you had wished.

“Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice...but the voice of eternity within a man [or a woman] it cannot drown." Kierkegaard