What I am Learning from This World Crisis.

What I am Learning from This World Crisis.

I'm the type of person who needs the answers when trouble comes. Most of us don't know how to respond when stuff like tragedy happens. The most painful experience comes when we blame God for things that appear to have no answer. When things like disease and illness comes, and other hard stuff, we can get stuck with feeling that there is no answer. The twenty first century has been a century like no other. The amount of suffering worldwide and among us close to home, can leave people with little to hope for. The quest for justice and other rights, as I see it, is just our way of saying we have had enough pain and suffering. The question we ask now is when will it end?

I have looked for a sense of hope from the bible, but some of our problems need interior work. It's not that the bible is insufficient, but sometimes we need to look at the why in a different way. When you ask a child who hurt themselves, the reason why they are suffering, the answer is usually an obvious answer. It's something they can easily explain. When the suffering is emotional, it gets rather complicated and we might need someone with more experience than us to help sort out the reasons why we feel the way we do. I now know that human emotion is more complicated than I ever thought and that emotional wounds take longer to heal. Religion can help in revealing some of the symptoms of why we suffer, but to be really satisfied with why, we have to look at our own minds and hearts.

When someone tells me you feel the way you do, because such and such happened to you, you might think they are right for a while because they are seeing you from a different perspective. What a good counsellor does is get you to explore your own reasons why you feel emotional pain. When we are able to validate ourselves in this way, we open the door to being kinder to ourselves. There was a time when things were not so tough, and looking back only helps if it can heal our present.

When things feel like they are out of our control, we need to surrender. Not in defeat but in acceptance. Trying to fight something out of your control is funny. It is not normal to do this. Religion gives us answers when we don't have them, so be open to God especially when you feel you have had enough. Faith is mysterious and it is surprising. It can pull you up when you are down. What I am learning is to accept things that I cannot change, while still remaining hopeful that God can intervene at any time. Faith can expect miracles, they are what we need when we feel all is lost. It is not an illusion when something miraculous happens, it's just God's way of showing the world that He is still here. This is Mike.

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