Going “With” the Grain, Not Against It

Harmony is about flow. As a learner driver must demonstrate he or she can move with the flow of traffic, using initiative, so should we learn to flow with life using the skill of discretion and spiritual discernment.

This is often harder than it seems and often it’s hard for seasons of life before it becomes easier once again. How easy is it to rub people up the wrong way, for instance? If we’re not careful, it’s ultra-easy...
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The ‘frowns of fortune’ as Balthasar Gracian put it, only seem unpredictable, yet there’s a good and bad side to everything. If we’re apt at looking for the bad in the good we’ll see it. Many blessed people are apt at seeing the opposite; that God-infused silver lining.

Harmony is everywhere, yet we can only see it if we choose it so. God, through our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ, has made a way for all things to be reconciled—for his grace to be known by us, directly. Those blessed with the true knowledge of God won’t fail in this:

They will see the awesome wonder of God over and above the putridness of any of the things of this world. They will hold both views simultaneously and know that in all things God is good, and that he above all and before all—and that anything else pales into drab insignificance!

Flow... harmony... shalom. Why would we inflict upon ourselves the pain that is not only unnecessary, because it is a lie, but which is also a veiling instrument blinding us to the reality of God in our midst? It defies spiritual logic, and even a practical logic—from the spiritual standpoint. (The spiritually-aware can see it, yet others can’t; therefore it has a practicability angle to it.)

The ‘frowns of fortune’ are both fickle and nebulous—fortune of its own matters little. It’s our spiritual perception of same that is the key. The spiritual eyes see or the physical eyes see—the spiritual eye, however, sees more than the physical eye sees; it employs the creative mind that God sponsors in Project Virtue. It stands back far enough not to be affronted. It appreciates the beauty in the dastardly.

It’s there. We merely have to look beyond our sense of very linear reason into the reason of God. It is in this place we find, finally, there is nothing that can defeat us whilst we’re in him!