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And if you don’t commit? I asked. “Your choice. But you miss what’s on the other side.” What’s on the other side? “Ah.” He smiled. “A happiness you cannot find alone.
uh.’…It’s amazing how folks can’t see you, ’cause they want to keep you in that past. Some of our greatest problems in ministering to people is that they knew us back before we came to the Lord—”
“No, I say. You knew me. You knew that person, but you don’t know the person that I’m trying to become.
The Reb once did a sermon on how the same things in life can be good or evil, depending on what, with free will, we do with them. Speech can bless or curse. Money can save or destroy. Science can heal or kill. Even nature can work for you or against you: fire can warm or burn; water can sustain life or flood it away. “But nowhere in the story of Creation,” the Reb said, “do we read the word ‘bad.’ God did not create bad things.”
“He leaves it to us,” he replied. “Now, I do believe there are times when God clenches his fist and says, ‘Ooh, don’t do it, you’re gonna get yourself into trouble.’ And you might say, well, why doesn’t God jump in? Why doesn’t he eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive? “Because, from the beginning, God said, ‘I’m gonna put this world into your hands. If I run everything, then that’s not you.’ So we were created with a piece of divinity inside us, but with this thing called free will, and I think God watches us every day, lovingly, praying we will make the right choices.” Do you
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The story of my recent life. I like that phrase. It makes more sense than the story of my life, because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality—and, in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.
God has put you in the position where you can always do good,
don’t let trivialities dissolve friendships
