|
|
Dalton
Roberts |
|
|
We all have experiences we never understand. We find someone and think we are a perfect couple. One day we get a “dear john note” and think to our self, “I will figure this out. There’s got to be a reason.” You go to the experts, talk to friends who may have insights and valiantly try to understand it. After a year you look at your insights and think, “Maybe in another year I’ll have this all figured out.” You step up your research, talking to anybody and everybody who has ever been around this person long enough to understand anything at all about her. After that year you still don’t understand it. Five years pass…the research continues…then ten years. No understanding. One day a great big spotlight in your head flashes on the canvas of your mind YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND! Your happiness the rest of your life depends on the extent to which you accept that you are never going to understand. This is not a fatalistic view. There are zillions of things in this life you won’t understand. Why make such a big deal out of not understanding this one thing? Just add it to your list. When I was a teenager my girlfriend’s mother was dying. Must have weighed no more than 75 pounds. We were playing volleyball out in her yard when she sent for me. She said, “God told me if you’d pray for me I’d be healed.” I’d never prayed for a dying person to be healed. I was scared. But I managed to get through a prayer for her. She jumped out of bed rejoicing and was in church the next Sunday. She lived many years. Later a young couple with a child suffering from leukemia sent for me. One strange healing that I didn’t understand (I was almost frozen with fear) and suddenly I get the reputation of “having the gift of healing.” The child died. When that child died something in me died. In time, this inner dying just became a large cast iron question mark I carried around in my innards. I finally stacked it up with hundreds of other cast iron question marks. I keep open to the possibility of eventual understanding but that’s all it is: an opening. It is no longer an obsession. Each day I deal with that day’s questions. I rejoice in the few things I do know and remember Twain’s words, “It’s not the things I don’t understand that bother me but the things I do.” I have come to believe one of the highest levels of consciousness is being comfortable with not understanding. What we can’t understand is something we can’t be held responsible for. That’s a valuable comfort right there! Dalton’s
writings are gathered at www.IPSFeatures.com
|
