Application - The Third Catalyst for Change

So, now you’ve had an experience that you would consider important, and you’ve taken the time to understand what it meant and how it affected your views of life. That’s it, right? If only it was that simple. Now comes the hard part – work.

You see, after you reach the understanding of the event or situation, you have to make a conscious decision to act upon that knowledge. This is where the line between God’s Will and Free Will is drawn. Let me explain it this way.

Let’s say your doctor tells you that you need to lose a few pounds. You’re border-line diabetic, and your health is declining. This is the experience. What comes next is the understanding. You might do research about healthier menu options. You might visit a couple of different work-out facilities in your area. You might even look into holistic, or natural methods for weight loss. Problem solved, right?

If you take action towards improving your health, yes. But knowledge doesn’t always equate to action. Changing our habits is hard. It’s tough to suddenly become an early morning person so you can get in a workout before your commute, especially if you’ve never done anything like that before. It’s hard to give up your favorite foods, or to reduce your portion size at meals. All of this takes time and effort. There has to be a willingness to change.

Think about the resolutions you made a few months back. Are you still doing them? All of them? At the same level that you had promised you would? If so, congratulations! You’ve done what thousands of people haven’t. And, if you are one of those thousands of people, then you get my point.

Application of change is by far the most difficult part of the process. And, it is the most important as well. If we don’t make the change, then we remain where we are. Stuck. We never become ready for what is meant to happen after, because we won’t recognize it. We are still seeing life the same way we always have. It is impossible to change our current situation if we stubbornly remain entrenched in the beliefs we have today.

All change requires action. It requires discipline. It requires desire. If we lack either of these three, we either extend the amount of time it takes to reach the change we are meant to, or we never do. Again, this is why some situations in life happen over and over again. We either failed to understand the message of the events, or we failed to take action. The good news is, neither of these are fatal.

The other good news? God understands. He was the one who gave us Free Will in the first place. He knows there will be times when we won’t feel like changing, or when we feel we aren’t ready, or when we believe we aren’t strong enough. That’s why He sends us help.

The help that He sends can come from a variety of different sources. It might be a supportive friend who is going through a similar situation. It might be a random encounter, like when someone recommends a book to us and it turns out to be exactly what we needed to read. There are an infinite range of possible ways God helps us. It’s only up to us to recognize His help when it comes.

Most of the time, we pray for an answer, and then we wait, and we wait, and we believe God didn’t hear us. But the reality is, He did hear us. And He did answer our prayer. We just didn’t realize it because it didn’t look like what we asked for. And so we walked right past it without even giving it a second glance.

This is why it’s so important to learn to accept whatever comes our way. We never know when a random gift will turn out to be the answer to our prayer. So accept everything. Even the things we don’t like at first. They are there for a reason, and that reason is to help us grow.