Questions Or Burn the Village Down

Any time of any day of our lives it can feel like someone is trying to burn the village down.

Maybe it’s us. Maybe we’re fed up with the way life is at home, on our job or in the world in general. We’ve had it. We’re up to our clavicles in disgust. We’re ready to destroy whatever is wrong in our lives even if it means destroying our entire lives. Maybe we’re just ready to dump everything and move on.

Perhaps it’s somebody else who is ready to annihilate everybody and everything. They feel like they are completely useless, that their lives are of no more value character. Rather than dealing with life as it is, with facing facts and doing what they can to make life better, all that person ever seems to want to do is go through life like a little child out to destroy every tower of blocks they see.

Our temptation is to take that childish person and swat their behinds. It may not be your temptation, but it is often mine. I don’t do well with children and worse with childish adults.

I was fascinated to read yet another story recently about a very smart, very influential man who was in line for an extraordinarily powerful position. He was rude and arrogant with his coworkers over the many years he had held his job. It was the up to his coworkers to decide his fate. They turned him down. The position he so badly wanted and for which he was frankly well prepared went to someone else. His previous bad behavior doomed his candidacy.

Stop and think about it for a minute. That man, so eminently qualified, had defeated himself by his own arrogance. He had burned down his own village with all of his attempts at self-aggrandizement. When the time came that he wanted more and bigger and better, it was out of his reach.

We all do the same or something similar at some time during our lives. The word from our angels, if we have the willingness to listen, is very simple.

Stop.

Behave better. Live better.

We want to know why we don’t get the fancy job or the fabulous house or the hottest car on the road, but do we stop to ask ourselves if we need them? It’s nice to want, but so what?

When I was graduating college I was offered the opportunity for a good job and a stable future in a great industry. I turned it down. Perhaps I couldn’t see all of the strings attached. I saw enough to see that they were woven into a rope that was tied around my ankle if I took the job. The first time I did anything to disturb those who had the job lined up for me I would feel that rope jerk me until I was pulled to the ground.

Did I have a better plan in mind? Absolutely. I thought so. However, that plan had been blown up half a dozen years earlier. I failed to see the original plan which had always been in place. I was blind to the places it would take me, the many people I was still to meet, the places I would visit and live. I had no idea that there would come a time when I would be offered an incredible opportunity to live in a place I could scarcely imagine. The whole thing was far beyond my wildest dreams. Because I instinctively knew it was not where I was supposed to be, I walked away from that dream city and dream job. Just as at other times I left cities I loved for cities where I was supposed to be. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t like the new cities. I went since they were cities where God had jobs for me to do.

Some of the things I did after college fell right in place with what I was supposed to do with my life. I asked the questions how to get to where I was supposed to be and listened to the answers. It appeared to outside observers that many times I was off in left field. I wasn’t living according to societal norms.

That would be an accurate assessment.

I was never supposed to live according to societal norms, even the norms I wanted to live by. There was another plan for me. A few times when I didn’t like the plans I tried to burn down the village. I ended up singed and more than slightly crispy.

In normal human society we think of magic as something performed on a stage by men and women familiar with sleight of hand or else performed by witches.

The ultimate magician is God. We have our frustrations and angers with God. This God person is supposed to behave like a grandparent who gives us everything we want. There are days when I want to go to the local bakery, eat everything in the cases and lose ten pounds. Experience has taught me that now that my teen years are long gone, so is my ability to burn up all of those carbohydrates. Likewise, the days when I loved getting behind the wheel of a car and taking off down country roads are long gone, as much fun as they were.

If you have questions about where you are in life, what is going on, why and how we got here and will this madness never end, there are answers. Answers where, even if others are being destructive, behaving like naughty little children who need a good spanking, we don’t have to do the same.

We can do worse.

We can frustrate the living daylights out of them by listening to our inner God, by praying, meditating, living good and decent lives. We can be kind when others behave dastardly. Throughout history as well as today there have been those people who absolutely astound the average folks by their inability, their moral incapacity, to be good, decent humans.

They have a constant desire to explode the world. It’s one of the signs of the morally bankrupt.

Remind yourself as many times as you have to every day that living well is the best revenge. Be good. Do good. Make the world a better place to live, no matter who tries to stand in your way nor what follies they commit.

The world is worth it and so are you.