By Banji Ayoola
When money is temporarily withdrawn from one, and one is made to go through hard or lean times, to experience lack and deprivation, there are certain lessons to learn.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, one’s neighbours who are going through pains and experiencing hard times.
Such moments are to awaken empathy in one, such that one 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 oneself when one is permitted good times again.
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 oneself and then in deeds. In helping truly within one’s ability.
Again at such moments, one is made to experience the pains, suffering, embarrassment, humiliation that one, in one’s prosperous times in the past, might have caused others who, now are experiencing material comfort due to their own weaving. And whose earthly paths, one is allowed to cross again now that the table is turned, to settle accounts and balance the records.
The moments are such as would lead one to the voluntary recognition of some evils or wrongs and then resolve never to act again in such a crude manner as to cause pain to, or even harm, the other person. They are moments of ar’ise ko’se, ar’ise f’ise s’ile.
Or to teach one certain lessons, to polish and mature one.
Such sobering moments offer golden opportunities for one 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 him through which 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 often to reap and eat the now ripened bitter fruits we had wrongly sowed sometime in the past, 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 luminous heights.
