Crossroads
It's something about the human condition that allows us to face the same soul turmoil and end up at vastly different remedies or responses. Listening to one of my favorite songs this morning, I began to lend my time to this phenomenon. Some of us know from the time we were tots what we are called to be this side of eternity, yet many of us live oblivious to this for most of our adult lives.
I am cognizant of the fact that the journey through life can take us through some extreme contrasting terrain, allowing us to have mix signals when trying to decipher or answer the call of purpose. I am moved to consider that while we all have equal opportunities to discover and answer the call of purpose, these opportunities can be shaped by the following intentional attitudes:
Contentment - For us to discover and answer "the call" on our lives there must be a meeting between comfort and discomfort and at this place contentment is born. We become content not by accepting life as it is but by acknowledging that we are all on a journey and nothing remains the same forever. We come to understand that our current state of being is but one blip in the grand scheme of our lives and thus we take pleasure in journeying through it.
Hope - Hope is predominantly a feeling of expectation. We live in a day and age when the calamities occurring around us makes it difficult to expect things to get better. To live is to expect; life is expectation. When we breathe we don't think about where our next breath will come from, we just expect that it will come. If we allow ourselves to lose hope, we lose the expectation to live and if we lose the expectation to live, how can we discover much less answer the call of purpose on our lives? We hope because our lives depend on it.
Generosity - I firmly believe a generous person is a fulfilled person. To be generous one doesn't have to have a lot. Many times the most valuable things we have to give money cannot buy. When we give of time, our love and of our efforts to those who are in need, not only do we end up helping someone else discover or answer "the call" on their lives, we end up doing the same for ourselves. We are most generous when we allow ourselves space to explore our feelings about our present realities and freedom to reject or cultivate feelings that this exploration may bring.
“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”
Contentment, Hope and Generosity are important facets to enjoying this journey called life. You see, some might harp on thought that we can only play "the hand" we have been dealt and that given some of the situations/circumstances that we might have had to live through we are prone to, maybe even fated to react in a negative manner.
I disagree with this notion, simply because I believe that every situation/circumstance comes stocked with the opportunity to be content, to be hopeful and to be generous. I am of the opinion that it is a simple matter of perspective. Over the past few months perspective has been a recurring theme in my life and everything time I embraced a positive perspective, I have been blessed tremendously and those times when I made the choice to embrace a negative perspective of the events occurring in my life at the time, I have reaped tremendously of that choice as well.
I would like to leave you with the following thought:
Knowing what we are called to do is a great thing and many times on the journey to answering this call we find ourselves in situations we would rather not be in. It is at these places that we meet at a crossroads: one path is marked 'positive perspective' which leads to contentment, hope and generosity and the other path is marked 'negative perspective' which leads to discontentment, hopelessness and selfishness.
I have decided to choose the path marked 'positive perspective', what about you?