The New Day

Happy Naw-Ruz to all my Persian, Bahai, and Muslim friends!  (Does anyone else celebrate Naw-Ruz?)  

Last night I started thinking about what I've learned this year and what I want to focus on for the new year.    There's a lot.  A lot learned; a lot to improve; but here are the highlights.

--Life is a workshop, not an art gallery.

We are not meant to live our lives like pieces of art adorning walls--showing off our beauty and satisfied in our perfection.  This world is the world of carving, of sculpting; this is the workshop where we work and toil to reveal our latent beauty.  Chipping away at self is or should be the watchword for our daily activity in this workshop.  Carving away at ego and self until naught but our true selves--our heavenly, virtuous, reflecting-the-attributes-of-the-good-Lord selves--remains.

--Never insist in prayer

I think this is probably obvious and I technically have always "known" this, but sometimes you can trick yourself into thinking you're not doing it (you know, little caveats like...if it be your will God, please do this and this and this...).  I'll never forget, former Universal House of Justice member, Mr. Grossman gave a talk to the youth once and someone asked him how you can know when you're meant to persevere in a situation-especially one you've been praying about- and when you're meant to give up.  And Mr. Grossman said something along the lines of (this is total paraphrasing, like 13 months after the fact, btw), "I think often we know.  We know what we are meant to do, but it's not necessarily what we want to do.  So we keep praying,[ hoping for a different outcome.]  This is not good.  We should not insist.  At some point, you must act."  I thought a lot about that that night.  Situations I felt were confusing, situations I felt I couldn't understand what I was being guided to do.  And I've realized in so many of those, I was so terribly attached to what I wanted the outcome to be, all I could hear was my own voice.  There was no detachment, no true desire to actually listen to God's will, in case it diverged from mine.  How idiotic!!!  His is ALWAYS better.  It just always is...and in the end, I think His will prevail anyway...but the path that gets us to the outcome will be tremendously harder if we go our own way.  (Needless to say, this year I am especially thankful for the fact that God overlooked my stupidity and did not answer some of my more caveat-included but-still-insistent prayers.)

--Be grateful.  This is an amazing day and age we live in.  "This is a day for great things."  Be grateful.  And work hard. Transformation of self, and transformation of society, is some serious business and requires serious effort.  Seriously:-).

Happy Naw-Ruz, y'all!