Problems bring Lessons

"As a progressive and evolving being, man is where he is that he may learn that he may grow; and as he learns the spiritual lesson which any circumstance contains for him, it passes away and gives place to other circumstances."
- James Allen (1864 - 1912), As a Man Thinketh


It has taken me a long time to be able to look at a problem I'm having as a neccessary spiritual lesson. To be frank, I'm still not always really excited to be enduring pain and frustration that negative circumstances usually cause. Some days I'd like to "play hookey" and skip the lesson :-)

But as I look back at my life, it is easy to see that the times when my wisdom and understanding grew to new levels; those times when I approached becoming the person I long to be; it was always the times that followed negative circumstances. The greatest growth you're going to have is going to come from the negative circumstance you have today that sometimes seems too overwhelming, too big to scale.

Writings in Byways of Blessedness, James Allen is strong in his call for us to embrace our circumstances. "Let a person rejoice when he is confronted with obstacles, for it means that he has reached the end of some particular line of indifference or folly, and is now called upon to summon up all his energy and intelligence in order to extricate himself, and to fund a better way; that the powers within him are crying out for greater freedom, for enlarged excercise and scope."

"No situation can be difficult of itself; it is the lack if insight into it's intracies, and the want of wisdom in dealing with it, which give rise to the difficulty. Immeasurable, therefore, is the gain of a difficulty transcended."

Maybe that explains why it sometimes seems that I can't shake a particular problem, or have one that keeps rearing it's ugly head. Instead of fighting it, I need to jump in and gain the insight and wisdom to handle it. Then it would be gone -- only stronger, both in spirit and in wisdom!

And that's worth thinking about.

- Vic Johnson
Excerpt from Day by Day with James Allen.


-- Posted from my iPhone