If we’re attuned we can often find that circumstances guide us to develop spiritually.
Every situation can be viewed as a “spiritual growth opportunity.”
I wrote this yesterday and soon had my own spiritual growth opportunity to test the consistency of my practice with my preaching. (Life has a way of doing this…)
A package sent to me in the mail never arrived. I tend to get anxious about these sorts of things because I want closure. When it’s unclear how or when something will be taken care of I feel as if I’m left hanging. Furthermore I’m forced to be engaged in something I don’t want to be engaged with. I didn’t want to have to contact the post office and the pharmacy and worry about when I’m going to get it and all of that stuff. Being preoccupied with this was stealing my attention from all the other things I do in a day that are important to me.
Not coincidentally I had recently been thinking about my father’s quality of what I call “energetic composure.” It’s a very rare quality and my father was an expert at it. Usually energy and composure don’t fit together in one person. There are the laid-back types who take their time about things and there are the energetic types who do things very efficiently and are always busy.
My father, Julius Groner may he rest in peace was a do-er. When I mentioned once at an anniversary party for my parents that if my father said he would do something it was done yesterday, everyone laughed. They knew this from personal experience. He acted energetically yet he was always composed, pleasant, calm and good-natured.
As a lawyer he once had a client from South Korea who wanted to immigrate to join his family in America. My Dad went early in the morning every day to the immigration office with a pleasant demeanor, speaking on this man’s behalf. He did this for months! Whenever he noticed the slightest crack in their openness to listening he praised them to their superiors. Soon other clerks also wanted to be praised. Finally the people at the immigration office were tired of seeing him and they allowed the man to immigrate.
He had faith. Faith to him meant trusting in his God-given tasks, accepting those tasks with humility and implementing them with genuineness.
There was no apparent progress at the embassy for a long time. How did he know he was doing the right thing? His determination, persistence and patience were not a function of any certainty of success. He knew the results were not up to him. It was a function of caring about another human being. This man needed his help and he was capable of helping. It’s as simple as that.
When you care you do.
There is a different kind of certainty we can have. Faith to him meant trusting that every single good action has endless good impact. Looking back, obviously each trip to the embassy that was seemingly for nothing was having a cumulative effect. Looking forward he also knew that regardless of what the end result would be he was doing something.
No good action ever goes to waste, no matter what result we see or don’t see. We might call this the “law of positive input.” Just as life has unconditional meaning and every moment has unconditional meaning so too every positive action has an unconditional positive effect. He had faith in the dynamics of reality, faith in his connectedness and relationship with the world and his Creator.
Here I sat, pondering all of this while waiting for my package. Then I asked myself: Is there more I can do right now? Yes. Apparently the package got sent to the “lost packages department.” I will call the post office again to find out exactly why they can’t send it on to me.
First I decided I would play my bongos and divert my nervous energy elsewhere so as to dereflect and also not mix any negativity into my conversations with real people.
They explained that once a package is marked as “lost” or “can’t locate recipient” there’s no turning back and it must be sent back to the sender. Strange rule but I realized I could not fight this. Okay, so I’ve done all I can do today. I put it in my calendar to take care of tomorrow and put it out of my mind.
Today I called the pharmacy, explaining calmly and pleasantly exactly what happened. They answered just as pleasantly, apologized for the inconvenience and said they would send out a new package today. I thanked them.
Perhaps I’m just a tiny bit closer to my father’s quality of energetic composure. At the very least I am sure that my calm and collected conversation with the clerk had a positive impact on the world. I know that it had a positive impact on myself.