Rejecting Stubbornness; Engendering Resilience

“They who, having lost one ideal, refuse to give their heart and soul to another and nobler, are like people who decline to build a house on rock because the wind and rain ruined their house on the sand.”

~Constance Naden (adapted).

This is a marvellous wisdom contending with the soul-predilection to look instinctively and stubbornly back at the erroneous past for direction for the future—a vast and calamitous folly; one strident in a failure to learn.

New things and new thoughts as disposed to the new life will never make sense to us in an inherently disappointed state of mind.

The things we’ve known are not all there is. There is more. Faith tells us there is still a lot we don’t know which will sweep up our present understanding in great corpuscles of wondrous, though at times embarrassed-in-retrospect, joy—from the point of retrospect. This is the faith-held future (a hope) informing the present and not our past.

The Same Tired Message – It, However, Never Loses Its Power

Looking onward to the future is about presenting to our minds a version of the past that wasn’t always understood as it perhaps should or could have been.

The trouble we have is we see this nobler venture before us only in the light of the less noble one that was swept away before our eyes. The disappointment is ‘enhanced’ with a belief that the nobler thing will be ever more beyond us, not that it was perhaps the right thing, or the right way, in the first place.

Jesus, of course, used this analogy so far as faith and true wisdom is concerned in Matthew 7:24-27. Those who hear his words and put them into action build on rock.

The nobler thing—the ideal of truth built more firmly on rock—is the only way life will really work. Why, then, would we flinch at it, shaking our metaphorical fists at God? Of course, God’s not bothered at us cutting off our noses despite our faces, beyond at least knowing and accepting the disappointment that the vast majority of humanity live in stubborn ignorance.

Yet it needn’t be us that choose this way! Stubborn ignorance is always a choice.

Getting Over Our Pride

Punching through the veneer of pride is not a hard thing; not with the will of the mind that’s grown as supple as elastic, pliable to God.

We harm only ourselves by wasting our time and not doing things right when we can. No one else is truly bothered; not like we are deep down, below the vestiges of our propagating consciousness.

Once pride is subjugated to the heralding of reason we can and do go on—we ‘pass go and collect our $200,’ before venturing onward and upward.

The foundation of rock is before us.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.