Monday, September 15, 2008

Adding a couple of days to the faith

Sharing my challenges as I go through this recovery period is proving more interesting and challenging than I had thought it would be. My guess was that I'd have some pain and discomfort for a few days and then a couple of weeks of healing while gradually returning to my normal activities, minus riding my motorcycle. Unfortunately this is not how it's been going. I had a follow-up visit, unscheduled, today because of an unexplained swelling in my neck.

In terms of tearing into my faith about recovery, the "we don't know what this is, but need to watch it for a few days" is more destructive than "we need to get you into surgery right now" which declares knowledge and approach leading to cure. It honestly is the not knowing what is happening versus what should be happening, since I went through this once before with flying colors that causes discomfiture. Seems to me the point of faith, that we all share, is that knowing reduces discontinuity or conflict within ourselves. Knowing what to do and what the outcome could be puts pieces of a puzzle in place. This allows us to construct scenarios around resolving our fears, at least for me it seems to.

And ultimately this is the problem, or challenge, or hope that each of us has to live with -- that the possibilities of outcome can be substantially limited and thereby allowing us to address the issue at hand, recovery. One of the issues that this scenario drives for me is the question of faith in god for salvation. Certainly accepting that whatever I'm doing will result in salvation, or immortality of soul, reduces my inner conflict and provides a vehicle where I can objectivize my behavior against an external standard and proclaim, "See I earned it. It's mine by right and privilege".

In my current situation, I can not point to some objective activity and say, I've earned this healing which I am due, since I did not do anything except to let the possibilities of healing within the natural universe take charge as they should, therefore I have no obligation due me. If I had fervently prayed for healing, or meditated to a healing program, or even just sat quietly and let divine energy flow over me, this would have been something. Yet I did none of these because my faith said it will work according to God’s plan.

And that’s the bummer. I gave it up to God’s plan, to the consciousness of the universe for an outcome that I held to be favorable. Only now that something I did not expect to be present has happened, what justification for MY desired outcome is there? The universe is filled with an infinite multitude of possible outcomes for my situation. Faith is my ability to see that despite this impossible number of outcomes, those that will develop are those that will allow me to continue along this mortal path until the next situation triggers my wonderment and caution about how to employ my faith for something other than fear of an unknown outcome.

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