When it comes to personal growth, at the very time life feels most threatening—as if it’s perhaps even about to sink our ship—instead of seeing it as our enemy, we need to trust it.
It may seem crazy, but I have seen over the years how there is an incredible wisdom in the way life has brought to the fore each of the aspects of my life that have asked me to grow.
It isn’t just that we rise to the challenge, no matter what life throws at us. Disaster always challenges us to re-personalize—to become more than we have known ourselves to be.
It’s that the very untrustworthiness of life, which may seem like caprice, can be trusted.
I use the word “trust” as a clearer way of saying “faith.” So often the word faith causes us to stray into the realm of beliefs, which tend to be mental concepts that are often of no more transformative value than their placebo effect.
Faith also conjures up for many of us images of faith “in” something, such as a “God out there somewhere.” In other words, it’s frequently associated with the so-called supernatural.
When whatever the current deal in our life situation may be doesn’t work anymore, the mystery at the heart of existence—which is the source of the essence of each of us—shakes things up.
In a sense, it’s us shaking our life up, because this mysterious Presence is that inner grower in us (often called the Holy Spirit) that’s at the core of our essential being.
I’ve come to see how, over and over, I have invited into my life the very situations I dreaded because something in me knew I had to go through these situations in order to become who I really am.
Whatever we try to avoid—whatever we dread—must ultimately be faced. Life will have none of us going our merry way fearfully, holding back, reining ourselves in, dodging the unpleasant.
On the contrary, life is in the game of stretching us. It seeks to expand our horizon, opening us up to our intrinsic greatness. This is what I mean by being forced by disaster, grief, pain, and the like, to re-personalize.
Our true person begins to emerge more and more in response to the massaging carried out by our life situation. And life knows just how to walk us into the precise situations we require.
We are pressed to dump our old ways of being, over and over, until all resistance on our part dies down and our essence is at last aligned with our existence.
Trust isn’t about some otherworldly state, but about a quiet confidence that life is seeking to tease out our greatness even when everything around us is falling apart.
Trust in the wisdom of life is the key to allowing ourselves to undergo transformation.
David Robert Ord is author of Your Forgotten Self Mirrored in Jesus the Christ and the audio book Lessons in Loving--A Journey into the Heart, both from Namaste Publishing, publishers of Eckhart Tolle and other transformational authors.
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