It’s someone else’s fault or it’s your responsibility. Apparently those are the choices.
When it’s someone else’s fault, when it’s out of your control, then there is plenty of justification to point out someone else to blame. Things happen to you. You barely have any control. Something good happens – well what a timely stroke of luck. More often than not, though, it’s being quick to highlight why the bad thing was down to your parents not treating you right, your teachers not believing in you, your peers taking you for an easy person to pick on, factors stacked against you due to those characteristics to which you had no control – you gender, your ethnicity, your skin colour, your sexuality, your economic background, your state of physical and mental health. These things happened to you – you had no control and neither can you control what others do with that information. Life happens to you. You can barely make anything happen, you’re just about surviving by reacting to the stuff that happens.
When you’re responsible, you’re the captain of your ship. You’re in charge and however you set the course for your ship of life, you will surely go. You are in charge. No one will tell you what to do because your face is set on the course. You happen to life. You have your agenda. You have your goals. You will achieve them because the power of your mind says so. The power of your focus, your commitment to the goal, the sheer tenacity and force of will must bring about that which you invest yourself in. It must surely come to pass because you have spoken it, you have seen it in your mind’s eye and what can stop you? Every obstacle set before you by your social status, you can negotiate and work through because the power of your thinking is immense. Anything you perceive, you can achieve because of that supreme power in your self-belief.
These are two compelling narratives that can dictate life. Rarely do people find themselves totally subscribing to one or the other. Yet they have their appeal and folks are enticed to one or the other at different times of their lives. There remains an alternative narrative …
You are not a mistake. You are not here by chance. It is not a whim that sees you existing at this time. There might be a tragic and tough story that explains how you came to be, but that is not the bigger story to which you belong – and you do belong to a bigger story. It is not your story, but you play an intrinsic part of the story. Your contribution can see the blessing or the curse in the story depending on if you see yourself as the central character of it.
The central character in this story is the one who created you. The one who marked his image on you with the capacity for great good. Life begins and flourishes when there is ongoing acknowledgement of the Creator and getting in tune with His purpose. Bad things will happen and there’s nothing that can be done to avoid that, but there is a reference point in the Creator to cultivate the strength to allow what happens to shape you in gracious and merciful ways.
This story also involves an acknowledgement that self-regard and pouring the focus on what self can achieve is what contributes to much of the impoverished condition of the world. Wilful focus on the self rather than the Creator is what has led to death, dismay and despair. Turning to the provision made by the Creator can turn the narrative from one where things happen to you or you have to impose yourself on life to one where life can be enriched and nourished by relying on what is the plan of the Creator.
Returning to this narrative can not only say no to the ego, but yes to the one who really rules and enjoy something that blaming others or self-reliance can never deliver.
It’s a narrative to consider.
(Photo by Shahadat Rahman on Unsplash)
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 