Don't Settle

If you're hurting and tired, if you feel the odds are stacked against you and you're unsure of tomorrow. If your whole world seem upset even after you've done all to stand, let these words from C S Lewis comfort you.

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself... We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."

The pain and the crushing, the one that brings the new wine is the very one we don't want. We don't understand it and our default response to it is despair.

Nevertheless when you know that there is something more, something better, you honour your being, you reach out for it, irrespective of what you currently have or feel. You don't settle, you don't ignore the fact that you're unfulfilled and that your comfort zone is now being made uncomfortable.

Damn the odds because you know that reaching out and failing is better than staying and wondering what's at the other end of the curve.

We're constantly asking ourselves if we're making the right choices or even right for wanting more, we then refuse to move and corporate with God.

Mahatma Gandhi said, "freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes." Yesterday I was thinking about our independence and my personal liberties. How I became much more free at exploring the world, at testing limits and definitely at not minding what the world thinks.

I've learned in the last few years that the most important kind of freedom however is to be what you really are. Often we trade our realities for a role when our realities does not have a bearing on what's acceptable by popular opinion.

At the time when we trade "being" for "doing", we also trade in our true self for an act, we give up our abilities to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.

I'll never go there or be that again. We all need a personal revolution, on an individual level first before we can dream of any collective revolution. It's got to happen inside first. That revolution must allow us dare to do good things, remove ourselves from negative situations while we cooperate with God to achieve amazing feats through our lives.