Awaken, my friend!
Keep praying . . . God will make things right for you. I so trust in the goodness of Heaven. My soul hurts for the hurting. None of us have a choice in DNA, family of origin, circumstances of the world . . . These are "givens".
Earthly challenges are unfair and not loving. God, on the other hand, is ALL just and ALL loving. If I were the gambling sort (and I'm not), I'd bet all that i am and own on that of Heaven.
There are no "gifts" unless Jesus, God and His Holy Spirit somehow wrapped in it.
One day, LOVE and justice (in Him) for ALL. amen
hearing you
On Aug 27, 2013 Jonathan wrote :
"If we did not feel that some ultimate kindness holds sway, we would feel like outsiders confronted on every side by a world toward which we could make no real bridges," wrote the author at the end of the first paragraph. Most people, however, have ample reason in their experience to give them doubt about the kindness inherent in the world. When your life experience suggests to your ego that kindness does not hold sway, what do you do? I think that fundamentally, the answer humans have had is attachment, in different forms - material, emotional, mental. These attachments give us the experience of a bridge between us and what we are attached to. Ultimately, we are pushed by life to let go of these attachments, and when we do, we can feel an existential loneliness. This is a good thing, because we are close then, it is said, to experiencing the Self, which can only be experienced when we are not actively attached. But when we sense that loneliness is threatening us (that is, threatening our attachments - it certainly cannot threaten the Self!), we often make or reinforce those illusory bridges. To the extent we can not depend on those bridges, is the extent to which we can realize that the nature of our world, as the author says, is truly kindness. We experience, in essence as the author assures us, that we are all connected by bridges of kinship as brothers and sisters, children of God, our "hearts imbued with longing for beauty, meaning, order, creativity, compassion, and love" as he says, seeking to make those 'kinship bridges' tangibly real in the world. Now if I could only see this as I look across my interpersonal landscape through a glass darkly, my regrettable conditioning - so much of it unconscious, ingrained from a karmic childhood of misfortune - seeking refuge in the safety of bridges not between my Self and your Self, but between my desire and my object of desire, that is, in attachment. I need some awakin-ing, my friends.