Life is questioning you
A parable tells of the woman who carried her dead son to Buddha and asked that he be brought back to life. Buddha told her to get some mustard seeds from a house where no one had died, and he would use them to heal her son. The woman visited many houses with her request, but of course, there was no such place because everyone had been touched by death.
Her fruitless search slowly led her to acceptance, and she was able to grieve and move on.
The Apostle Paul in his first letter to Christians in Corinth wrote:
There has no trouble overtaken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be troubled above that ye are able, but will with the trouble also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it.
The way of escape implied here isn’t that the trouble will be removed because it goes on to say that we will bear it. It means we will source the power and wisdom to bear it.
Like the woman going from house to house, we realise that the “trouble” is asking a question of us: What will you do now?
This reminds me of a quote from the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
Someone once said that if we all put our troubles in a huge pile and were then allowed to choose which troubles we’d have, we’d all choose the ones we’d placed there, because we know, deep down, that we have what it takes to handle them.
Living with mindfulness
A Buddhist parable, words from St. Paul, a Jesuit quote, a pile of troubles.
When we’re faced with troubles, don’t desperately look for a way to run away from them. Accept them. Therein lies the next step.
Help is all around us. Wise words wrung from those who have learned what it is to be human whisper to us down through time.
Don’t question life.
Realise life is questioning you.
When troubles arise, Life is asking: What will you do now?
With love, Marlane