KS&L 382 It's Just God's Will by Tina Erwin

         Recently someone mentioned to me that life is pretty much what happens when you are making other plans. But then those ‘other plans’ are just God’s will after all and that ultimately there is nothing that we can do about it.

         Really? What happened to free will?

         So, here’s the question:

         Are the things that happen God’s Will or the Free Will of the individual?

         Yes, things happen and we have free will in how we handle them, how we adjust. It's the point of free will. If we are left thinking that it is God’s will that horrible things happen then what’s the point of ever trying to improve things or make a difference?

          Lets look at an example.

         What if someone we love dies as a result of that person being in a car with a drunk driver. Our loved one made a conscious choice to get in that car. Perhaps he or she didn’t make a decision to die that night but they did choose to accept the risk of death that getting in the car would engender. This isn’t God’s will it is free will.

         Our family can go to pieces at the death of this person or our family can work diligently to heal. Which is God’s Will: healing or hurting?  But then ‘will’ implies a directed outcome, so why would God insist we hurt? Isn’t God helping us heal? Yes and no. We have a choice in how we heal any catastrophic event in our lives. We can rise to the karmic opportunity presented, and embrace our grief, pain, and suffering, or we can retreat from life and martyr ourselves for the rest of our lives. We make that choice, God doesn’t. However, if we choose to heal, God will help us find a teacher who can help guide our way to insight and understanding when we ask Him for help.

         But if it is true, that God wants us to heal, why does it hurt so much when we lose someone? It hurts because we have massive connecting ties to people we love and when those ties are broken, they come recoiling back to us and it is endlessly painful. But it doesn’t have to be painful forever. In this example we each have a choice in how we respond to any event. We can choose to heal it or to allow pain to direct our lives.

         So many people mistakenly think that an event is 'God's Will' and God has nothing to do with it. A person uses the gift of God: free will and makes a decision. That decision creates karma and that karma has to be satisfied. Everything happens in perfect order because Karma balances that order. God's will, if someone can call it that is really karma. What we do comes back to us. Every move we make creates a decision tree and how the karma is returned is always a function of which fork in the road we take, which branch of that tree we use.

         And karma never wastes energy so even a tragic event is pregnant with its potential positive consequence. This means that we always need to analyze what we learned from any event.

          Yes, life happens while we were making other plans because the karma that we create can come back to us at profoundly unexpected and usually inconvenient moments. But when each of us incorporates the lesson of a life-changing event and learns from it, then we acquire wisdom. Ultimately, that must be God's hope: that we will all become wise.

KS&L 381 Marriage Grease by Tina Erwin

      Courtesy is the day-to-day grease that makes life worth living. We make a request from someone with a sense of gratitude when we say ‘would you please’ do this or that. We honor that person’s service to us with an additional bestowal of gratitude when we say ‘thank you for doing that, or helping me, or answering my question, or returning my call.’

         ‘Please’ and ‘thank’ you are the spiritual/emotional elements that humbly remind us that we need other people to help us in so many ways, so many times a day. When a request is made of us without those magic words, it feels like we are being ‘ordered’ to do something, as if our freewill has been removed and we are now ‘required’ to do what this person demands. Dictators never say please and thank you.

         Family dictators can be relatives, grandparents, parents, spouses, siblings, and children. Children only learn about the ‘magic words’ of please and thank you from their use by their parents. However, the real magic comes when couples use the magic words between each other. And magic would be the key when it comes to these words.

         But there are some spouses who simply cannot say please or thank you to their husband or wife. When you ask why this is so hard to say, you get a variety of answers:

         • ‘Oh, please and thank you are implied. I don’t need to say it.’ Does your spouse know this? Is it implied for you too?

         • ‘I don’t have time for pleasantries, do you know how much I have to do with all of these kids? My husband needs to jump when I tell him to do something so I can keep my sanity!’  . . . .  Right. Bet he feels belittled all the time.

         • ‘Look, my wife knows that I love her and she doesn’t feel that need for me to say please and thank you every time.’  . . . Really, does she know that?

         • ‘I’m always in such a hurry that I don’t have time to do that, besides wives/husbands and kids don’t need please and thank yous. When you’re part of a family you don’t need that fake stuff.’ Fake stuff? When is common courtesy fake?

         • ‘Look, just do what I want. Got it? What’s your problem?’ My problem?

         The humbling concept of saying please and thank you force the ‘requestor’ to honor the effort of the ‘requestee’. Appreciation is always essential for any situation to work. Even the military never orders something to be done unless a situation is dire and someone’s life is at stake. Otherwise, it is considered military courtesy for officer and enlisted service member alike to say please and thank you. Gratitude eases all situation.

         In a marriage, this element is paramount. Couples with successful marriages never forget to be grateful for the efforts of their spouse. This –again – humble element helps to maintain balance between each spouse. Using these little words are the grease that gets things done on the often grinding day-to-day level of grocery shopping, putting gas in a car, putting kids to bed, making meals, cleaning house, and doing yard work. No, we don’t run around and gushingly say thank you for every single little thing, but the routine use of please and thank you make a huge difference.

         How big a difference? Consider that every single time one spouse ‘orders’ another spouse to do something and never shows any appreciation a drop of irritation is added to that person’s emotional reservoir. Day after day, drip, drip, drip of irritation is added to one spouse or the other’s emotional reservoir, slowly, deliberately, inexorably, poisoning that person’s emotions.

         How does this manifest emotionally? Irritation eventually turns to varying levels of despair, questions of whether or not that spouse is really loved begin to surface. If you love someone, you love him or her enough to honor their efforts – don’t you? Irritation can become irritability, which becomes impatience, which becomes short-tempered responses, which becomes hostility. Low self-esteem is another result and the feeling of worthlessness begins to creep into that person’s psyche. It’s cruel really, when you think about it, that one spouses selfishness robs the other spouse of his or her feelings of worth.

         How does this manifest physically? The body often mirrors emotional issues and needs. Skin anomalies may begin, other body problems begin to manifest and the person never fully feels ‘good’ about themselves, their marriage, or their choice of a spouse. There is a grinding feeling inside a person because the grease that makes a marriage work is totally absent. Without oil/grease in an engine, the engine will eventually seize. And so this little, tiny, seemingly petty detail of please and thank you will eventually cause a marriage to seize as well. Makes you wonder how many divorces could have been avoided if the simplest courtesies could have been implemented.

         Perhaps the greatest gift that spouses can give each other is the day to day, year after year courtesy that keeps a marriage happy. The greatest gift that parents can give their children is a good example of a happy marriage. And perhaps that gift can begin with ‘pleases’ and ‘thank ‘yous’, every single day

KS&L 383 YOLO or YLF? by Tina Erwin

       I was in aerobics class the other day and I heard someone talk about YOLO. Her clueless companion had no idea what that was, so the lady explained that YOLO means that You Only Live Once. The lady was very proud of her knowledge of this new acronym. Obviously, YOLO is now becoming part of the fabric of conversation  - as if it were true.

       But it isn’t true. You don’t only live once.

       You live forever.

       This is precisely what Christ meant when he talked about ‘life’ ever after – and that ‘life’ isn’t simply in the Heaven World.

       Just for fun, imagine that you do actually live forever. Now you are going to approach every situation with an entirely different view. You know for sure that the energy of whatever you do in this life is going to be returned to you not only in this life, but also in the succeeding lives.

       This concept causes you to view of life very differently because you will understand how karma works:

       * what you do comes back to you, and

       * you will have an experience until you learn the lesson and you no longer need the experience anymore – no matter how long or how many lives it takes.

       So, now armed with this revelation, think how you might live your life differently.

       • If you know you have to return again to this life, you will know that you have to work out that terrible relationship with your mother-in-law.

       • Living again with an abusive husband or wife, may make you want to rethink just enduring it ‘for now’ or ‘for the children’s sake’.

       •  Your life of crime may cause you to wonder how that karma will be returned to you in the next life.

       • Taking advantage of someone will mean that someone in some future life is absolutely going to take advantage of you.

       • The thoughtless way you treated that animal will be returned to you by how some animal attacks you in a future life.

       • Cruelty to your children may be returned to you as you become your child’s child in some future incarnation.

       • The love and care you give to the earth will be returned to you with greater knowledge and insight.

       • The energy of studying, of education and the knowledge that you are learning and sharing will open you up to far greater wealth of mental and spiritual insight in coming lives.

       • Charity, giving and sharing will have to be returned to you in some future opportunity. Do you really think lottery winners just ‘got lucky?’  No, these people have the past life karma to win that money in this life and perhaps in lives to come.

       • Self-sacrifice will make a huge difference in dire situations. The energy of success will be returned to you because you cared so much about others.

       • Caring for a greatly disadvantaged child? Think of how hard you are working to care for him or her. The energy of this love and care, this experience will be returned to you in some way in a different life. Perhaps you are enabling that soul to have a more complete future life as a mentally whole person.

       • Psychic ability used with a sincere heart, in accordance with spiritual law will enable you to have greater spiritual ability in coming lives.

       • Psychic ability used to tell fortunes, read cards and manipulate people will draw to the soul a very challenging future life or perhaps multiple lives.

       • Greedy dictators, drug lords, and corporate heads who abuse people, resources of the earth and power will find an exceptionally challenging future ahead of them.

       Every single life is an opportunity to do a better job at your job of learning as a soul on a path to enlightenment. Do not forget the prime objective: enlightenment. That’s hard in the day to day of bills, crazy bosses and co-workers, stressed spouses and kids and governments that have lost their way. Yet the mission requirement to work toward spiritual growth, never fades, never becomes less.

        Denying the reality of future lives, of karma created in past lives is like denying or questioning whether the sun will rise tomorrow. As we each lay down to sleep, we know that the sun will rise and we will get up. We live a new life every single day. Even if we die in the night, we will wake up in a new dimension, ready to face the next step in our spiritual evolution especially if we have the presence of mind to ask for an angel to help us with the transition to the Heaven World.

       Microcosm/Macrocosm: every yesterday is the microcosm and every past life is the macrocosm. The opportunity of every single new day is the microcosm and the opportunity of every single future life is the macrocosm of how the cosmic plan and karma work. YLF:  You Live Forever!