The fact that you can recognize wisdom in others, means that those same insights already exist within you. If they didn’t, you would have no reference to recognize it in others. All the realizations that we find by exploring the world can also be found by exploring within.
True connection with another cannot come from surface-level interactions. To have a bosom friend requires knowing one another at the level of the soul. Real connection like that comes only through vulnerability, and vulnerability always involves risk. If there wasn’t risk, it would not, by definition, be vulnerable. This is why making true friends is not easy, it is a dangerous business. It means giving others ample opportunity to really hurt you and hate you, but trusting that they will honor you instead.
And, of course, some of the people that we are vulnerable with will let us down. They will betray our trust; they will wound us in our tender places. Being willing to still trust anyone after that is hard. It may go against our natural instincts. It is like being struck on one cheek and then turning the other. But, of course, that is exactly what we are called to do.
True connection with God is no different. It comes by going with Him into most vulnerable of places: our shames and our sins. By acknowledging and confessing these worst parts, we give Him every justification to hurt us and damn us, but we trust that He will forgive and heal us instead. Coming to God is a dangerous business, but it is the only way to become His true child.
When you do what is right and suffer for it, what follows will reveal the purity of your motivations. Either you will feel regret, and know that you are only a fair-weather disciple, or you will feel conviction, and know that your commitment is true. Without being tried like this, your sincerity is only theoretical.
Man is mighty enough that he may bend God's creation
But it will always snap back
It is only when we are able to do what is right when we stand to lose the most that we gain full ownership of the virtue. At this point, no one can deny that we live and die by that truth. So long as the maintaining of our virtue is untested, it isn’t fully ours.
And so, if we are ever to truly own our virtues, each must be tested in the most trying of circumstances. God does not give these trials to hurt us; He gives them so that we can fully own something good.
It’s not uncommon to wish that the people in our lives would treat us better than they do, even that they would treat us as well as we know we ought to treat them. We wish our friends would be the ones to reach out instead of us, that our spouse would say “sorry” first, and that our enemies would forgive us before we forgive them. But we know that we’re supposed to do the right things on our own, regardless of what the people around us do. This can seem unfair, as it might see us always being the bigger person first, always doing for others the things that we wish were done for us.
But really this is only a limited view. If we widen our perspective, we realize that before we ever showed unreciprocated good to someone else, Jesus did so first to us. Jesus was the bigger person who fought for our hearts when we didn’t deserve it. Jesus was the one that took the high road when we were selfish and sinful. Jesus was the one who loved us before we loved him. Thus, any lopsided good that we now put out into the world is only paying it forward.
Some might say that maturity is being willing to do what’s right even when there isn’t any reward, but deeper wisdom is recognizing the reward was already given long before.
The soul is most imperiled, not by suffering, but by believing that it doesn’t need God.
It is not despair that goes before the fall, but pride.
Thus, the world will destroy itself from its richness, not its want.
Once you’ve decided that you don’t like someone, then however they are is the wrong way for someone to be. And if they were the opposite, that would be the wrong way to be, too. It must be the wrong way, because you don’t like them, so how they are must deserve that disliking.
But, of course, then it isn’t really something about them at all. You don’t like them because of something in you, not them.
And the opposite is also true. People can give their love to another person, and then still love that person, even when given absolutely no reason to do so. They love because of something inside of them, not in the other person.
So, whether you look at God’s children and see much to despise, or much to love, is a reflection of what is going on inside of you.
It is only natural to desire ill for those who have hurt or betrayed us, but we know as Christians that we are called to a higher ideal. We are taught to actively pull our mind back when it tries to fantasize our enemies experiencing pain, and that is good, but we still may feel that we cannot honestly wish them well. We feel that seeking good for those that harmed us is part of our calling, but until God makes a transformation in our hearts, we can’t feel good and positive feelings towards a person just because we want to.
Fortunately, we do not have to wish someone well to pray for their good. We may not be able to say, “I hope that you have peace, I hope that things work out for you, I hope that all is well in your life,” but we can always say, “I pray that you have peace, I pray that things work out for you, I pray that all is well in your life.”
Prayer allows us to invoke that which our feelings are not yet in agreement to. By praying for our enemies, we surrender the course of their lives to whatever God deems right. And then, if it is God’s will for our enemies to face consequences, so be it, we at least have the clean conscience of knowing that we had nothing to do with it. Not even on a spiritual level.
And perhaps as we pray for the good for our enemy, God will work in our hearts so that we can hope for their good with genuine love. In either case, it is great wisdom in God to provide us a way that we may formally support the good, no matter the feelings of the heart.
John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” With those words, he accurately identified one of the great problems we have in our modern Western culture: we invert who ought to be in service of whom. We get into painful situations because we constantly put ourselves above things when we are rightly beneath them.
Is my marriage serving my needs? Does this community match my preferences? Is my church supporting my beliefs? Does my conception of God align with my interests?
All of these are backward. Marriages languish because couples don’t submit themselves to the betterment of it. Society’s fracture because households don’t contribute to the whole. Churches go astray because parishioners rewrite its doctrine. God is lost because His children try to make Him in their own image.
Yes, the individual is important but never forget that some things are bigger than you, and you should be serving them, not the other way around.
Spiritual Wanderings 