Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Balance and Blessings

"Life isn't fair." This may be true for most, but I believe that family, fellowship, and friendship are dependent on fairness for the balance of positive power on earth.

We are all the products of the grace given to us by birth and the influences upon us as we go through this life. Arrogance is the belief that our knowledge, wisdom, and other gifts exist in a vacuum of outside influence. Humility is the ability to recognize and respect our own talents and weaknesses, and those of others. Stewardship is the fair and responsible use of our talents in better balancing the energy on earth.

It is sometimes hard to believe that there is any hope of balance in our existence. We can't understand why one is given so many talents and privileges while another seems to have few to none. This has led us to erroneously believe that there are classes of chosen people and classes of the deficient and damned.

In a world bent on balance, we see each of our gifts as an opening to service of those with other or less privileges than we were given. And, in those who are given different, sometimes seemingly few gifts, this is an invitation to find the best ways to maximize one's contribution to our earth.

It does none of us any good to write down to zero any talent in ourselves or in another while simultaneously raising others above the ranks of the merely mortal. As the most ancient myths point out, great gifts are very often accompanied by equally strong temptations toward our own destruction and that of our society.

The caste system and many other methods of protecting dynasties, be they of families, political parties, or religious factions, seeks to have a predictable and orderly process of passing strengths from one generation to another. This is not the way of nature. What we call natural selection in animals of a lower order is in humans actually an opportunity to always have a purpose for every person, even if that purpose is the sacrifice of oneself for a higher ideal than individual life on earth.

We will not achieve balance as long as we allow ourselves or those we love to be less than the blessings that they were meant to be.