There Comes a Time

There Comes a Time

There comes a time when a person must look at circumstances in life and make a decision. We are all human, and as every major religious work says explicitly or implicitly, we are by design imperfect beings – we muddle about, and we make bad decisions, or good decisions for the wrong reasons.

The former is worse than the latter; but every day, we are presented with an opportunity to grow and to change for the better – as Jesus said, you must be born again of the spirit. That is not simply saying some words, but has a much deeper meaning echoed by other religious texts – that to become a better person in the image of God, you must judge how you react to
these life difficulties, when a decision must be made.

Will you look at your own self interests, or the interests of the community? If you are in a bad mood, will you take it out on the people who surround you? Or will you do your best to conceal your bad mood in an effort to make someone else’s day better.

When the gun is pointed at your head, and the demand is information that will send innocent people to their deaths, what will you decide to do? Two vastly different scenarios, but with one enduring theme – putting other people before your own needs.

Of course, we are all human, and many of us must learn as we go along. Those who seem to know instinctively have been few and far between, and they have been the saints and the holy people to us.

Most decisions by most of us in this country will be of the more mundane sort – if you are in upper management will you actually push as hard as you can to get the best wages and benefits possible for the people who make the profits? Or will you simply shrug and say, ‘Oh, well.’

As simple as a laborer treating people with respect, and meeting life’s derisions with the knowledge that he knows what is truly important – love, and compassion and mercy.

Every day as we walk through life, we will make bad decisions and good ones. The trick is to look around the corner, and see how those decisions apply to others – the trick is to do what you can, and simply treating people with those guiding principles mentioned above is a gift greater
than money or power; if you have those things, and you have money or power or then attain it, you should not be able to stop yourself from using your influence or wealth to help others.

But sometimes – sometimes, the thing you must do involves realizing that this life is indeed an illusion to what comes next – when your decision means your very life and well being. Sometimes you must duck and run, but at other times, when those chips come down to the last one on your side of the table you must push it outwards with the simple knowledge that by the world’s definition you lose the game.

But to the true definition of life, you win the game. Every person that died because they would not turn over other innocent people, every person that died by the cruel, evil hands of the oppressors, whoever they might be, were looked at as fools by those oppressors.

But those who died saving others, as Jesus did, as others have, will be looked upon differently in the next existence. Of that I have no doubt; it is something which God designed into us, to be able to willfully ignore our own well being for the well being of others. It doesn’t happen all
the time, and it doesn’t happen all the time with every person.

We can only pray that it happens more and more often as we go along.

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