You’ll see the world with clear eyes when you stop messing about in the shadows and step into the light.
“But what about the wisdom borne of darkness?” you ask. Naturally, it’s a question that brings you comfort, because you’re prone to proving your worth through your sorrow and pain.
Well, you won’t stop functioning if you give up a little sadness and trade it for some joy. Actually, the joy rather suits you, and it’s often the answer to the torturous questions that bring you dis-ease.
We can’t predict the future. We can only walk the path that’s lit before our feet. That’s as far as the eye can see. The path may diverge 100 times, and take us to lands we’d never dreamed of before (and perhaps also to lands we have, in fact, dreamed of all our lives), but all we can see right now are the few steps just ahead.
Better to walk them, I think, and satisfy our heart’s longing for travel, than to stay stuck, rooted to one spot, for the rest of our lives.
Don’t be afraid when the curtains close on the window you were looking through, for there’s another view waiting to surprise you with its clear and captivating beauty.
There are too many possibilities. Too many ways to do right or to do wrong, and it burdens you immensely.
How crazy these confusions make you. How tormented with a sense that you’re always off-kilter, always doing something wrong. How can you live like that? You’re not a perfect human being. Not even close. But apparently your mind expects you to be.
You need help. This is not a way to go through life. There are simpler, better ways – it is those ways that you want. But you can’t make any decisions without racking up terrible anxiety and an awful uncertainty about the minutiae of every thought and inclination.
“NO, I’M NOT INSANE!” you want to shout. But the chaos is overwhelming; the din is too loud.
Where is the simple life? The simple life you long for in the stillness of your heart?
There are so many things to untangle, so many things to sort through. You’re afraid it’s all going to come pouring out. What are you supposed to do?
Enough of the fear! What a curse to your existence, living so small and so cramped. Especially dangerous is the fact that these thoughts – these fears – masquerade as aspirations to holiness and aversions to sin. But look at what they produce: a constant paralysis and anxiety that everything you could possibly do or think is a sin, cutting you off from God.
It’s a lifeless, listless, suffocating “faith.” This, if you ask me, is the devil in disguise, trying to take all that is good (and simple) and turn it into a source of anguish and fear.
You’re becoming afraid of life and shutting yourself off from it. You’re erasing yourself into nothingness – believing that your desires are selfish, misleading, bad – because you’re afraid of not being humble.
Holy ideas, misapplied and misunderstood – and the consequences are disastrous. This is not the life or the faith you desire – because there is no freedom or peace in it.
But you’re afraid to break free – afraid you’ll make yourself a “god” and not have the humility to conform to God’s ways. Afraid of offending God, of making yourself sole decider and determiner and king.
But look – doesn’t this “faith” sound like imprisonment to you?
“Well, yes, it’s being a slave to Christ,” your mind retorts.
But no! Stop! These distortions are complicated, unhealthy, and patently untrue.
Take a breath and let yourself follow the path of real peace. God will be with you the whole way through.
Why covet other gifts, when your own gifts are considerable? Faced with the prospect of losing the potentialities with which you have been endowed – would you hand them over, exchanging them for another set of talents?
In your heart, I believe you know that you wouldn’t – and that the natural aptitudes GOD has given you beautifully reflect the person you’re meant to be.
Don’t ask questions you don’t wish to know the answer to. If you fall into the trap of thinking someone will choose flattery over truth, you’ll wind up with an ego whose wounds you may not be prepared to minister to.