Did you ever think that maybe all your so-called difficulties and troubles are really your friends? Coming to you to make you stop in your tracks and reconsider what you are doing? Coming to you because something higher and better is waiting for you? Something more wonderful and vast than anything you can possibly imagine now, in your present state of consciousness? Did you ever have that thought?
Difficult as this is to believe, in my humble experience it is often true. Crisis and difficulties are our friends.
Read what the great poet Rumi has to say about this below:
"Checkmate" By Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
"Borrow the beloved’s eyes.
Look through them, and you’ll see the beloved’s face
Everywhere. No tiredness, no jaded boredom.
“I shall be your eyes and your hand and your loving.”
Let this happen and things
You have hated will become helpers.
A certain preacher always prays long and with enthusiasm
for thieves and muggers who attack people
on the road. “Let your mercy, Oh Lord, cover their insolence.”
He doesn’t pray for the good,
But only for the blatantly cruel.
Why is this? His congregation asks.
“Because they have done me such generous favors.
Every time I turn back toward the things they want,
I run into them. They beat me and leave me nearly dead
In the road, and I understand, again, that what they want
is not what I want. They keep me on the spiritual path.
That’s why I honor them and pray for them.”
Those that make you return, for what ever reason
to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.
Worry about the others who give you
Delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.
Friends are enemies sometimes, and enemies friends.
There is an animal called an ushghur, a porcupine.
If you hit it with a stick, it extends its quills
and gets bigger. The soul is a porcupine,
made strong by stick beating.
So a prophet’s soul is especially afflicted
because it has to become so powerful.
A hide is soaked in tanning liquor and becomes leather.
If the tanner didn’t rub in the acid
the Hide would become foul-smelling and rotten.
The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work on it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you will become lovely and very strong.
If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
You don’t even have to make a decision
one way or another. The Friend, who knows
a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,
and grief and sickness, as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you’re beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say,
with Hallaj’s voice,
I trust you to kill me."
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