Vandalia Republic News

Suffering

Some more wisdom from Silver Birch . . . Suffering Live with the law and you have harmony and peace within and without: live contrary to the law and you impose discord and chaos within and without. You are a spiritual being. One day you will have to face this fact. Better do so now and save yourself years of needless difficulty. The Source is infinite love and nothing happens in the whole universe without His knowledge. All suffering automatically brings its own reward because it touches the soul and, in doing so, gives it a greater awareness of the higher, deeper and more profound aspects of the universe. The world does not understand the function of pain and suffering and difficulty and hardship, but all these play an important part in the evolution of the human spirit. Look back in your own life and see that often the greatest crises, the difficult problems, the darkest hours, were the stepping stones that led you to greater understanding. You would not evolve if you always dwelt in the sunshine, lived free from care, anxiety and worry, where every approaching difficulty was automatically smoothed out so that it never touched you, where there were no rough stones for your pathway, where there was nothing for you to conquer. It is in the facing of troubles, and rising supreme over them, that you grow. Every experience is part of the pattern of your life. In the great universe where harmony is the law, each contributes to the plan. The events in your life, sometimes of bitterness and despair, of pain and misery, all play their part in preparing the soul gradually for the path that is being trodden. The darkness and the light, the shadow and sunshine, are all but reflections of one whole. Without shadow there could be no light and without light there could be no shadow. The difficulties of life are steps which enable the soul to rise. Difficulties, obstacles, handicaps - these are the trials of the soul, and when it conquers them all, it rises stronger, more purified, deepened in intensity and more highly evolved. Could the latent powers of the soul, infinite in their possibilities of expression, realise themselves without difficulty and pain, without shadow, without sorrow, and without suffering and misery? Of course not. The joy and the laughter can only be enjoyed to the full only after you have drained the cup of sorrow, for as low as you can fall in the scale of life so correspondingly you can rise. The more you have tasted and experienced that which seems the shadow of earthly life, the more you will appreciate, because of it, the greater joys of the sunshine. Your experiences are all part of your evolution. One day, freed from the trammels of flesh, with eyes not clouded by matter, you will look back in retrospect and view the life you have lived on earth, and out of the jigsaw of all the events, you will see how every piece fits into its allotted place, how every experience was a lesson to quicken the soul and to enable it to have greater understanding of its possibilities. There is no experience that comes to the human soul, which, rightly understood and rightly faced, does not leave you better for it. Can you contemplate a world of matter where there were no difficulties, no trials, no troubles, no pain, no suffering? There would be no evolution. There would be nothing to surmount. You would decay.