By Banji Ayoola
You should be grateful and thank the Lord. For putting an arrangement in place that ensures you are not left alone in distress and pain. For ensuring that you are not allowed to roam about in painful thoughts, in desperation as to how you would meet your most immediate needs.
At the time when money is temporarily withdrawn from you, when you are made to go through hardship, to experience lack and deprivation, there are certain lessons to learn.
Such as humility, compassion, self control and consideration for others who are in need, your neighbours who are going through pains, experiencing hard times.
Such moments are to awaken empathy in you, such that you will be moved to wish genuinely to identify with others who go through pains to help, to give and serve others who need help truly deep from within you.
Such moments do not call for mockery, derision, gossiping or tale bearing. They call for self control or restraint, soberness, true compassion, understanding and willingness to help, to give and serve first in thoughts deep from within yourself, and then in deeds. In helping truly within your ability.
Again at such moments, you are made to experience the pains, suffering, embarrassment, humiliation that you, in your prosperous times in the past, might have caused others who, now are experiencing material comfort due to their own weaving.
And whose earthly paths, you are allowed to cross again now that the table is turned, to settle accounts and balance the records.
The moments are such as would lead you to the voluntary recognition of some wrongs and then resolve never to act again in such a crude manner, as to cause pain to, or even harm the other person.
Or to teach you certain other lessons, to polish and mature you.
Such moments offer golden opportunities for you to change and become a better human being, who, by virtue of his new pure, good volition and deeds, will attract a new environment around himself through which the Light streams, with all the blessings they contain, bring and give especially to whoever is homogeneous, flow ceaselessly.
Such are moments of mercy offered us to atone for our past errors, cleanse ourselves of the guilt clinging to us from the past, which often span many earth-lives; become better human beings, salvaged, and then swing upwards towards the Light.
