Handling God's blessings with care 

It is permissible to take life's blessings with both
hands provided thou dost know thyself prepared in the
opposite event to take them just as gladly. This applies to
food and friends and kindred, to anything God gives and
takes away.

-Meister Eckhart
In order to live in freedom, we must learn to accept a temporary disappointment, if necessary, when it is for our permanent well-being. Sometimes, when we want to eat something that appeals to us, or when we want to eat a little more than is necessary, we can't help feeling disappointment as we push away from the table.
We cannot help thinking that we could as well have stayed on for five more minutes of pleasure, forgetting that it would probably be followed by five hours of stomachache at night. The right time to get up from the meal is when we want just a little more. This is real artistry, real gourmet judgment: when we find that everything is so good that we would like to have one more helping, we get up and walk away. ~Easwaran
Oh dear Lord, this is where I have the most challenge, and am at my weakest! 
Help. I need balance.

Comments

Susan Cowley said…
Sam, thank you for the timely reminder. Your focus was on food, as ours is at home just now with John diligently working to lose nearly 100 pounds.

Mine is on the "opposite event" with friends and kindred. Yesterday we memorialized a friend who took his life in June. Joining me at the service was a mutual friend who turned to me in earnestness but with a wide smile and said, "I've learned so much [since nearly losing her life with a brain aneurysm last winter]. I've learned to take it all as good. It's ALL good, whatever it is."

And now that I near the anniversary of our precious niece's death, who also took her life (at 15), I needed this reminder. I do not believe that God "took away" Maggie, but God certainly allowed her to end her life. Yet God's view of death is so vastly different from our own. At the memorial service yesterday, a short eulogy was given by a man who wrote a book about Bill Wilson who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. He said that when Bill W's niece died, it shook his world. Later he would say, "I did not know then that there is no death." How very minute is our mental acuity and sphere.

Truly, it is only in a depth of contemplation, solitude and silence that I have ever glimpsed the roofless universe and found it full of nothing but love . . . and a waiting.

I am deeply grateful, Sam, for your own quest.
Susan Cowley
July 26, 2009 at 9:42 AM
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