Is everything in our lives a reflection of who we are?

Yes and no, I would say. I have a hard time seeing this as a cold, natural law. Rather, I would say that God brings circumstances and individuals into our lives that show us who we are. And if we can shift this perspective something happens.

What I’ve come to realize, is that we can view life from all kinds of perspectives, but usually we are locked quite firmly into one, thinking that it is the only one. This perspective is often not spelled out, but can probably for most people be spelled out something like this: The world is what I perceive with my five senses and life consists of a set of more or less random occurrences and the effects of the actions that individuals in my life take. None of this has any built in meaning and everything is ultimately governed by the law of cause and effect. 

One example of a different perspective that we can look at life upon is the already mentioned perspective of an interaction with God, where God speaks to us through the people and events in our lives. Another one is the energetic perspective, where ultimately everything happens on an energetic level and our physical reality is just one way of perceiving these energies. The latter perspective also opens up for there being potentially an infinite number of different layers to reality. 

But let’s get back to the perspective that is the topic of this post. If we look at everything in our lives as God speaking to us, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of taking our power back, and at the same time needing to hand this power over to God. Because we know that we have the power to change our lives by changing ourselves. We know that everything in our lives is there because of us, even though I think speaking of that we have chosen it is misleading. But we also know that in order for this change to take place, we need to listen to what God is trying to tell us and change ourselves accordingly. 

And what God is trying to tell us is not always easy to discern. And why doesn’t God just speak to us directly anyway? To this question I don’t really have an answer. But I know that every time I ask myself the question of what a situation is trying to tell me and I’m really, truly willing to listen to the answer, I get an answer. But it is far from always that I’m willing to listen, if I’m being totally honest with myself. Which I far from always am, if I’m being honest with myself.

I of course know that enormous tragedies befall some people and I’m not here to argue why this happens. I’m talking about the lives of most of us. And for me to realize that everything in my life is telling me something about the person I am and the actions that I have taken as a result of my character, feels tremendously empowering. But first it was kind of a bitter pill to swallow.