Appreciating the Hard Times

photo credit: ben­hamin

My daugh­ter once said, “Mom, I don’t mind the hard times. Times when I strug­gle, not know­ing from where the money will come are spe­cial, maybe even sacred, times.” She con­tin­ued, “I’ve noticed that its dur­ing such times that I see mir­a­cles most clearly! I get to expe­ri­ence those “just-what-I-need-at-the-moment” sort of mir­a­cles. They stand out, those mir­a­cles, becom­ing so vis­i­ble, so evi­dent dur­ing hard times, and they strengthen my faith in Source.”

What beau­ti­ful words. Such a way of see­ing can only come from an under­ly­ing belief in a Uni­verse that is sup­port­ive. Dif­fi­cult times hold the pos­si­bil­ity of a breath-taking encounter (some­times through heart­break) with a Uni­verse that is ulti­mately kind. Chal­leng­ing times pro­vide a stark con­trast; the dark­ness cre­ated by our own fears makes the con­stant, shin­ing light of Source dra­mat­i­cally apparent.

The con­trast allows us to expe­ri­ence pow­er­ful moments of con­nec­tion with the One Real­ity. Dif­fi­culty in life offers us oppor­tu­ni­ties to encounter Source on a level that makes our rela­tion­ship with Source more real. We have a “per­sonal rela­tion­ship” with Source through such “hard times,” and we dis­cover we are con­stantly being sup­ported, right now and always!

When we have nowhere else to turn, we finally look to Truth where a con­nec­tion with Source makes all things pos­si­ble. Truth is the Real­ity of the con­crete, ever present Sup­port, avail­able to us just the other side of the wall we’ve cre­ated in our mind with our unhappy sto­ries about life. If we see a dark, scary world, then we must search our minds for the dark belief(s) that dis­tort our vision.

Real­ity is not against us, it is FOR us. Once we become anchored in that know­ing we begin to see the true real­ity of a world that is our unfail­ing mir­ror. The out­side world sim­ply reflects.

Our task then, is to clear the mind of its unhappy sto­ries, so we can see the beauty of a real­ity that is ever serv­ing us. When we see the world as our ally, rather than the enemy, we see the world in a way that’s exem­pli­fied by my daughter’s trust­ing words at the begin­ning of this post. We see a world we trust, a world where life chal­lenges are oppor­tu­ni­ties to align with real­ity. We see a place where mir­a­cles are every­day occurrences.

I invite you to let go of any thought that rein­forces an image of your­self as being a “vic­tim of hard times.” We are not vic­tims unless we choose to believe it. What we are, whether we believe it or not, are beloved chil­dren of the One Source from which every­thing comes.

Look for evi­dence of THAT. Make befriend­ing real­ity your sacred vow!