(*When I sat down to blog this morning, I had something totally different in mind to write, but this post on realizing our life challenges as opportunity for Awakening is what came through and insisted on being written  … I do not know how much YOU get from what is written through this hand, but I sit at the feet of the Source of my Supply.)

Transforming Struggle to Opportunities For Awakening :

I often wonder, in my helpless baby moments when I am on the victim triangle, why my life is so full of challenges. I moan and groan about it as I was doing recently when my Higher Wisdom piped up and provided me with a bit more insight into why life is marked with difficult moments. I was shown that we ALL must go through necessary challenges at each phase of life. They are the life hurdles that are designed to strengthen and grow us.

I saw that we don't get to “arrive” somewhere and stay. Growth means we must go on to the next level of challenges; it means that there is always a reason for the particular challenges we face. Our challenges are specific to us, designed to prepare us for the life lessons yet to come. Rather than being thrown at us to trip us up, these difficult passages are actually FOR us!

Our life challenges do not come to us because we are failures, or because we did something wrong that we are being punished for, or because we are unloved, or because we have been rejected by a Universe who deems us unworthy. NEVER does the Universe act out of such motives! We are beloved and well “parented” by a Universal Intelligence that seeks to foster our ultimate highest and best good through the discipline gained from the very life challenges we so resist! Perhaps we have forgotten that we signed up for Earth Boot Camp when we said “Yes” to this earth tour of duty. Our difficulties are rites of passage, by design.

Life challenges are built into life; this is how we know they are an essential part of life. No one gets off easy. Everyone has their own load of life-expanding challenges that must be lived through, whether we grow from them or not. How we deal with these life challenges is our personal choice.

Just by virtue of having a physical body that ages and eventually fails to function, it guarantees that we will face challenges. Every age has its own set of challenges built in. If challenges are built into our life existence from birth then how can we deny the predestined need for challenge as a part of the path that every human must walk? How can that which is designed to guide us as disciples be about punishment for some arbitrary doing or lack thereof?

No! Our life challenges are what shape and shift our seeing to align us better with that which we came here to achieve and become. They are part of our on-the-ground training.

By studying carefully the lessons offered to us through the life challenges we have already faced and overcome, we can often find the ways they have strengthened us and even set us up in preparation for the things we achieve. Life challenges refine us through the questions they require answers to, and through the storms, they bring us face to face with life. Hardship and challenges often serve as grist for the mill towards becoming our best and most mature selves. They coax us towards grace, gratitude, and acceptance.

Or challenges can drive us to collapse into puddles of ineffective misery, all depending upon how we meet them. And that is our choice. We can choose to either meet challenges and hardship with resilience and thus overcome, OR we can choose to meet them with resistance and collapse.

The Universe is NOT mean; it IS relentless. It has its job to do, which is to induce growth, to move us from the state of consciousness that has us lost in immaturity. We are like babies ranting and raving about how unfair life is and how it should be easier. We feel entitled and constantly demand more. Only through life challenges are we brought into the gratitude that goes with FINAL resolution. Only on the other side of the challenge, do we find ourselves thankful for what we have, even if it is NOT what we thought it “should” be. This is how we become “grown-ups” (Becoming a grown-up is the real purpose of our spiritual journey.) Coming out the other side with grace and acceptance of what is is the stuff of maturity. As mature souls, our battle-scars from the life “problems” we have encountered tell a story of wisdom gained from life lessons well-learned and now ready to share with others who follow.

At every stage of life, we are met with new and different challenges; often these are age-specific. For instance, every child faces the challenge of learning to walk at one stage of life, and then at a later stage they take on the challenge of learning how to ride a bicycle – later driving a car becomes their age-specific challenge. As I said, we are all guaranteed such age-related challenges, so that even if we somehow escape bigger life challenges, we will have those that go naturally with being in a physical body. These age-related challenges, once met and surpassed, become part of the foundation needed as a firm footing for the next challenge – all aimed to evolve us into full-fledged grown-ups.

But most of us are also given a fair supply of more personal, individually tailored challenges. These personally “crafted” (by Universal Mind and our own Inner Nature) challenges are not accidental happenings; they are not a mistake. Spiritual Law reminds us that there are no mistakes, that even those seemingly aberrant happenings are actually “plotted” (by Higher Mind) into the journey we are here to take, as preparatory lessons, for where it is we have come to go.

For example, I think of my close friend who was born with unformed, non-functional thumbs. The challenges he has faced at every juncture have been difficult, but necessary on his way to becoming the amazing artist and brilliant man that he is. His hands have played an essential role in almost everything he excels in today. His hands have been his teacher, his task-master, as well as the bane of his existence. They have been an extreme source of embarrassment and visible proof to him of a belief he has carried since early childhood about himself as being imperfect, and therefore less valuable than others. The hurdles his hands have required him to overcome have been life lessons that have brought him into his spiritual nature. They have taught him humility and acceptance towards the infirmities of others. Not only that but his hands have motivated him to strive to achieve things considered beyond the scope of possibility not just for himself, but for anybody. He, through the process of overcoming the inherent challenges his hands have demanded, can perform manual tasks with ease and finesse that even “normal” hands cannot do. His life challenge has turned him into an absolute miracle of expression.

Each of us has our own particular “schedule” of challenges we are given, again not because of our lack of luck or worth, but because we are loved and therefore provided with the life lessons that will bring us closer to the Source of our being. These challenges that we consider “unfair” and unfortunate, are the very life lessons we need to stretch and expand us to acquire the abilities and strengths required to achieve the purpose for which we came.

Part of our personal work is to learn to see our life challenges as that which we face for a reason; they are designed to help us realize them as stepping stones to a Higher Self Expression. The Guiding Principles teach us how to befriend our life struggles and meet our life challenges with grace, dignity, and a peaceful understanding of the necessity for the challenging life we may be given. They teach us to turn them into instruction for a better Way of life.

Are you ready to embrace your life challenges as friend and teacher?

*If you do indeed find value through such “Sharings” then join with Jaquetta and Me on Reality Formula Live where we explore the Work that has been handed me over the years. We need your support in building our online community.

(After I wrote this, I was moved to reach for the Bible and open it randomly.  I opened to Hebrews 12:5:

“My son (daughter), do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son (daughter).” )