Meeting Ourselves Coming and Going

Interfaith Celebration Gathering

In southwest Virginia, there are winding roads meander all over the countryside and up and down mountains. While the mountains of southwest Virginia lack the majesty of the ones in the southwestern United States, they are certainly not lacking in height and rugged terrain. Many of the mountains that once knew only winding roads are now traversed with barely curving interstates.

The older, winding, sometimes even meandering, roads are still there, a bit shabbier than the interstates, but still serviceable. The switchbacks on some of those older roads, as they weave their perilous way up and down mountainous terrain, are so severe that people say about them, "you meet yourself coming and going" on them. 'Meeting ourselves ‘coming and going' is a recurring theme in life for most of us.

Just as the winding roads in southwest Virginia allow the travelers to see the road they have just traveled, our life's journey allows us to reconnect with our past in insightful ways.

And when we look back, we can surely see God’s hand at work in our lives. If we look hard we will see that God has helped us through the trials and tribulations of our lives. Times in our lives that we found so stressful became lessons for our growth.

Looking back, we can see that not only did we survive the events of our lives, we learned important life lessons, lessons we can now share with others or use to make our own lives smoother. We can see the self that we used to be in others and offer advice that may save them from having to learn their lessons in the harsh manner in which we learned ours.

It is only after we have lived through trying times in our lives that we begin to know who we really are. We learn who we are in relation to others, who our true friends really are, and how people actually view us. We use this information to get in touch with our inner selves, to break down the barriers of what our ego would have us believe and be able to see our true selves. We are God’s beautiful creations, God’s experiential component.

When we open our lives to God and get in touch with our inner selves, we see who we really are. No longer do we view ourselves through critical unloving eyes. We see that we are imperfect, just as all things and people in this world are imperfect. When we allow God to dwell within us, to guide us, to be a functioning part of us we become perfectly human. That does not mean we do not still have character defects that need work. Nor does it mean that we know all the answers.

When we allow God to guide us, what we learn is what we are supposed to learn. Rather than veering off the pathway of our life’s journey into unproductive side trips, we stay on the road God would have us travel.

Once we are under God’s guidance, we soon see that learning lessons on Schoolhouse Earth does not have to be done in such painful ways as we have been learning them. With God’s help we begin to see when our lessons are first presented to us to learn. Most of us in the past either failed to either see our life lessons or were not willing to learn our life lessons when they were first presented to us.

Nor were we willing to learn them the second time they were presented to us, or the third. Each successive presentation of a particular life lesson gets progressively harder and more painful. Had we chosen to learn our life lesson at its first presentation to us, we would have found it much easier to learn and a whole lot less painful. When we let God guide our lives, we soon learn to be open to the first presentation of our life lessons. When God guides us, we learn our life lessons before they get to the painful stage.

We can look back over our lives and see the many times in which we ignored the life lessons that were presented to us until the circumstances under which we ultimately had to learn our lessons were incredibly and unbelievably painful. We can now see ourselves in others. Just like we were traveling on the winding roads of Southwest Virginia, we meet ourselves coming and going.

May God add a blessing to these humble words.

AMEN