By Mesha Oh
She was a giant bundle of nerves. She had been through some very harrowing times. She had been troubled by many different fears for almost as long as she could remember. And now, with advancing age, the matter only seemed to get worse. She couldn’t get herself away from imagining that all sorts of scary things might happen to her. The barrage of stories that she read in the newspapers only magnified her existing fears and fuelled new ones. Such horrible things were happening in the world—what if some of those things happened to her too, she would fret, almost constantly.
She did have her moments of lightness and laughter every now and then. But overall, her life seemed an enormous burden to her. There was just one thing that kept her going, though: her faith in God. She didn’t know much about God, but, instinctively, she felt that there must certainly be some all-powerful Person or Being who had fashioned the whole world, including herself. It was only this instinctive awareness of the reality of the Creator that saved her from losing her mind and her will to live.
She had heard many religious theories about why ‘bad’ things happen to some people, things of the sort that she so greatly feared might happen to her too. She was familiar with some of the major theological arguments for the existence of suffering and evil in the world. When she was wracked by her fears, sometimes she would bring to mind these theories to try to make sense of what she was going through and calm herself down. They provided her with an explanation for suffering—in the world at large, and in her own life too—and also some consolation. But then, very soon, her mind would be shaken by the apprehension that these theories just might not be true. “There are no rational grounds for accepting them as correct. They may just be make-believe,” her mind would tell her, and then she would go back to obsessing about her fears.
One day, when she was utterly tired of trying to stave off her fears, she firmly told herself, “I’ve really had enough! I’ve struggled for decades to stop fearing but I haven’t been able to one bit. I’m going to leave my whole life to God, the One Who brought me into this world. Let Him do with me just as He pleases. I just can’t manage anymore. I’m just too, too tired.”
Saying that, her mind went to some of the many imagined future scenarios that would so haunt her, and then she said to God, “God, You do with me what You like. You are my Owner, and so You can do with me just as You wish. Only, two things, though: Please let only those things happen to or with me that You will for me; and, please let me rejoice in whatever You will should happen to me when it does happen. Let me have a smile on all the time, knowing that whatever is happening with me is Your will for me and nothing else.”
With that little conversation she felt a sense of deep calm. She didn’t want to think of any fearful scenarios, at the same time as she felt that if whatever happened to and with her was God’s will for her, she would be able to pass through it exceedingly joyfully in the knowledge that it wasn’t something random or unfair but that it was just what God had wanted or willed for her.
Nothing could give her more joy than doing or experiencing something that she knew was what God had wanted or willed for her. If she had to face something because it was what God wanted or willed for her, she would gleefully face it, she felt. There would no question of any sort of fear at all!
Comentarios