Now my friend is going to complain. When he e-mailed me about his frustrations, I wrote him about three P's of enduring success - Patience, Persistence and Prayer. When I started taking that and turning it into a series for this site, another friend suggested adding Positivity which was a wonderful idea and addition.
When my friend saw there was now four P's, he started getting on my case about how I had short changed him. Well, buddy, now you're really going to feel slighted because here's P number five!!
Perspective
It doesn't matter who you are. No amount of money, fame, talent, skill, religion or plain dumb luck will keep you from hitting the occasional speed bump in life. Sometimes it will feel like Life has just sucker punched you in your most sensitive area. You are not immune and everyone has their own sob story. Welcome to the club. But it's through these challenges that we grow and become (hopefully) better human beings for it.
You could be using the Law of Attraction to visualize your partner being nicer to you, to stop disrespecting you when out of the blue, they leave you to be with someone else. You could be praying steadfastly for a promotion when you suddenly find yourself out of work. That new business you started while walking in faith could cause you to go bankrupt, lose your house, livelyhood and even destroy your relationship. Perhaps something terrible has happened to you, or to someone close to you.
All of these have happened to me personally or people I care about deeply.
At times like these we feel tremendous pain in our lives. Often we become discouraged, frustrated, angry and resentful at God for allowing it to happen. Little do we realize that we needed it to happen for our dreams to reach fruition. Often it's not the event itself that is ruining our lives, it's our lack of proper perspective.
When my marriage fell apart, I did everything to try to make it work. I went ninty percent of the way to fixing everything that was wrong with it, only to discover my wife wasn't even willing to do ten percent. I did get angry and blamed God. I walked away from my faith for a time because I couldn't understand why he had allowed my marriage to end when I had done everything 'right'.
Now looking back, I realize it had to happen. I had asked for it too. Even though I didn't realize it. I wanted a loving relationship but you cannot change someone through Law of Attraction nor will God change someone for you. So what happens? I was no longer a vibrational match for that reality. It naturally began to fall away so a vibrational match could replace it. Being with that woman would never bring me the satisfaction I was looking for, so she was removed from my life so that I could enjoy a loving relationship.
However, I totally lacked perspective. If I had seen it that way at the time, I would have maintained my faith in God and would have continued to envision the type of relationship I wanted. I would have attracted a better match into my life and been living my dream. Instead I stubbornly wasted years trying to move backwards while still moving forwards. When I finally gained the correct perspective, I quickly, and rather unexpectedly found a wonderful, passionate love again.
A friend of mine had been praying for increase in his job when he suddenly found himself out of work. Why? Probably because where he was working was a dying industry. There was no increase possible for him there. So God moved him out of there so he could instead bless him with opportunities that he never would have considered otherwise. He's now benefitting from multiple sources of income and gaining a feeling of control over his life he's never known before. Again, though, we struggled with finding a proper perspective. He was angry about losing the job he'd held for the last decade. Scared about what the future would bring. He lost sight of increase and just focused on finding anything at all, changing what he was attracting into his life and delaying the entire process God had intended.
I could give many stories like this. In all cases, looking back, we're all happy those things had happened to us. We see how they have benefitted us and if they hadn't happened how we would have been stuck. However, it's rare when we are going through those difficult times we are able to maintain a proper perspective. We see only want we're losing and take our eyes off of the very goals we are in the midst of achieving, causing us to delay our blessings. We end up hurting ourselves, through our lack of faith.
Ironically it's not only the valleys that cause us to lose perspective, it's the hills too. When we are at the top of our game we often lose perspective of what's really important.
It the last blog about Prayer I quoted Jesus talking about the parable of the seeds and explaining that the seeds that were sewn in the thorns were those that accepted the Word only to lose it to doubt or distraction. We just finished talking about how the valleys in our lives cause doubt, so let's talk about the distractions the hills can bring.
Ask any Pastor or Priest and they'll tell you that when the economy is great attendence drops and when the economy tanks people suddenly remember church. Why? Because while we are happy to seek God's help in the hard times, all too often when things are going great we want to take all credit for it. We become full of ourselves, egotistical, perhaps even feel invunerable. We start enjoying our new found wealth, power and fame and forget why we even wanted them in the first place. We start to seek them not as a necessity to better our lives and the lives of our loved ones but seek wealth, power and fame in and of themselves. 'Keeping up with the Joneses'. We glorify in our ability to create but without any firm foundation as to why we are creating our reality. We allow the excesses of life to distract our focus from what really matters.
Soon we find we have that which we sought but it's empty and meaningless. We become confused, feel lost and often crash and burn. Sometimes we see this dramatically played out in our celebraties. We watch them rise to soaring heights, come crashing down to dismal depths, and hopefully if they haven't lethally overdosed on drugs, eventually rise once more but with a firmer foundation on why success matters to them and what they want to accomplish with it.
In the end all that's changed is their perspective.
So how do we keep a proper perspective when everything seems to be going to hell in a handbasket? More on that - tomorrow.
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