By Rev. Glenn Neil Stocking

There is nothing new to the saying “Life hands us what we need, not what we want.” How we react to our gifts determines how often we continue to get what we need before we see what we want materialize.

We may be barefoot and soiled, feel hunger and want food, we may think we are poor and want wealth. We would like to have both the food and wealth delivered as soon as possible, now would be good. Instead we get a plate of mud. But it is okay, this is Life giving us this plate of mud and Life will continue to give us mud for as long as we need it.

If we see it as a plate of useless mud, we can pretty much count on there being an endless supply of it until at last we starve. If we see the mud as the raw material for making a brick, the supply is now tailored to our need for bricks. We can use the bricks to build an oven and only enough mud need be delivered for the oven’s construction.

Once we have a working oven, others will hear of it, including someone with grain but no way to bake bread. Spirit hooks people up like that, some would say nature abhors a vacuum and thus any need is fulfilled. The bread alone relieves the first issue of hunger, but now others hear of the bread and bring their wealth to trade. Some bring other food stuffs to be cooked, others bring trade goods of all types, coin of the realm changes hands, wealth circulates and grows.

We no longer hunger, we are acquiring wealth, and as a bonus, we now have a community of partners, customers, tradesmen and friends. Everything springing from a plate of mud; and our understanding that Life has given us what we need, including the wisdom to see beyond the plate before us.

It seems all is good in our world and we might be happy for it to continue this way. We are however evolutionary creatures and the need to grow nags at us to push outward while our contentment argues for the status quo. Evolution wins and we are delivered additional plates of mud. Mud is what the status quo sees, for it is content and does not want to change, but our Spiritual wisdom sees an opportunity. We already have an oven, and with it we can make better bricks and those better bricks can make a better oven.

With this new oven we can shape steel and the word spreads and someone with iron ore and no way to process it hears about our new oven. We shape the steel into rails and boilers; girders and rivets; wheels and ships and all manner of things never before dreamt of. We are able to build bigger and stronger and move things around the country and around the world and people bring new things to trade, coin of the realm changes hands, wealth circulates and grows.

Some of us begin to believe that we have created this enormous wealth, that we have created these wonderful things from our own minds, forgetting the One Mind and become fearful that others less wise and inventive want to steal what we have wrought of what we now believe is our individual intelligence and hard work.

We turn our attention to building fortresses and weapons, hording our good and forsaking our brothers who we now see as rivals and threats to our good. The flow of wealth dries to a trickle and those others dependent on its continued flow grow fearful too and plot to free the wealth from its prisons forgetting it flows on demand, value given for value received; they employ deceit and cunning to steal that which was never theirs, and always theirs, forgetting that wealth is transitory in human hands but always at hand in Spirit.

We become stagnate and fearful, angry, ugly and mean. We are stuck in a mud of our own making; we are sinking with our boots being sucked down into the mire. Some fortunate few stop fighting the mud; they see the raw materials for bricks; they forsake their boots and pull themselves barefoot and soiled to solid ground; they build an oven and others come, coin of the realm changes hands, wealth circulates and grows.

Learn more about Spirit, the One Mind and Life’s unexpected gifts at a Center for Spiritual Living in your community or on line starting at CSL.org and CSLFTL.org.