How on earth do you make life work?

For the person brazed in confusion, overwhelmed with despair, shattered by a moment all too true, here is something for you…

Regret is the common experience of everyone. It’s life’s design for motivation. Nothing motivates like regret. And even if your grief has no feature of regret about it for guilt, you especially will need some way of accepting what you cannot hope to change.

There is no sense for remaining in a state of regret
and to refuse to see its purpose.

Nothing motivates
like the redemptive power for change
nested in regret.

As for love and forgiveness, let’s see how these two majesties work.

Love with everything that is in you. That’s a pleasant place to start. You may not have much love to give. Let’s not presume you’re a past master in the praxis of loving. Watch who love and appreciate and adore you. Return them that love in your own way. You’re probably thinking of that person or people right now.

Stay there.
Keep them in mind.
Keep that loved one or dear friend
foremost in your prayer.

Then listen for what you’re told to do — for the act of kindness only you can do at that time. It may not come straight away, so stay aware and keep listening. By listening I really mean thinking. Bear them continually on your mind and in your heart.

Then there is forgiveness for those who don’t treat us nicely. They’re usually the unapologetic ones. Know the power in this bizarre reciprocation; love them with a love that utterly confuses and throws them. Don’t look for any other satisfaction than their bewilderment. Such a state of perplexity gets some people thinking. Your loving them in their loathing of you is the charity of invitation. Such a thing is operant forgiveness — it teaches you both something.

By applying a faith that you have no guarantee of working, you operate in the hope that has no promise of realisation. Doesn’t sound compelling does it? Yet, that is true faith and hope. No true hope and faith is guaranteed success. Hope and faith require risk. They require investment with no promise of gain.

So, we ply our forgiveness in the hope and faith that it may work, knowing that where it does work, both of us will be taught something.

But there is more. Even overtures of hope and faith, for the purpose of love and forgiveness, provide a reward. More so, much more so, when they go unrewarded. There is great power gleaned in loving without need of reward.

Suddenly, our forgiveness of a person is no longer contingent on how they respond. How they respond begins to matter less. If the person we’re forgiving attains any joy from your being upset, that power is removed from them when you cannot be upset.

Everything happens for a reason, yet that, at certain times in our lives, comes across like a wet fish across our face. Do we actually know if everything happens for a reason? We cannot know this. But what we can know is this: a philosophical attitude of accepting the things you cannot change always improves things.

Given the fact life is so incredibly unpredictable, we should be open to chance, and when chance takes us, and we have no choice in going with it or not, we should embrace the passage of chance the best we can. As Helen Keller said, life is a daring adventure or nothing at all. Do any of want to die before we’ve experienced true adventure?

The only life that is worth anything
is the life that lives by faith.