“When we accept ourselves exactly as we are, and where we are, we have more energy to give to life. We are not wasting our time trying to make things different. Any moment that we relax into the deeper ground of our being, giving up all struggle to be anywhere else, we’re in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. There is a plan for our lives—God’s plan—and it oversees where we are and where we need to be going. As soon as we have learned to live most brightly in our present conditions, new and better ones will arrive immediately. But until we learn the lessons of the present, they will simply reappear in new guises, and it will seem as if nothing changes.
It’s not up to us what we learn, only whether we learn through joy or through pain. But if we don’t yet trust that every situation is a lesson, we don’t bother to ask ourselves what the lesson is. And unless we do, our chances of learning it are nil. Then the lesson will reappear—with ever higher stakes—until we learn it. We may as well learn it the first time, when the chance to learn through joy is still available. The more times a lesson has to come around, the more pain it will generate. If you know in your heart that something is wrong, then ignoring it won’t make it any less so. It will simply make fixing it even harder, when it is brought about by a louder noise than the original sound of God’s whisper in your ear.”
Marianne Williamson, in “The Gift of Change”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
