Application February 16, 2014

There is an order to things. When your life feels like it is falling apart — when financial hardship arrives, relationships break, and the world shifts around you — the spiritual answer is not to try harder. It is to step into the order that already exists. To take your rightful place in the hierarchy: not as the center of power, but as someone connected to it.

The Three-Dimensional Hole of Self-Will

Self-will is the deep human tendency to act as if we are the power source of our own lives. To run everything from the self — its fears, its pride, its relentless need to control outcomes. And when self-will is running the show, a specific kind of suffering follows: we create drama and find ourselves strangely attracted to it. We become our own worst enemy. We fight with the world while trying to survive in it. We feel bad — and we cannot get ourselves out of it, because we are the very thing producing the feeling.

That is the hole. The way out is surrender — not to defeat, but to a power greater than our own wounded, limited self-will.

What Enduring Strength Actually Looks Like

Ultimate surrender leads to God — and to the enduring strength that God provides. Because God is the one who brings us a sign when we do not know which direction to go. God is the one who places the right person in our lives at the right moment, to tell us there is more goodness in us than we can see right now. God is the one who sustains us through financial hardship, broken relationships, and social upheaval — not by removing those difficulties, but by giving us the capacity to endure them and grow from them.

Spiritual hierarchy is simple: God at the top, followed by the principles we have chosen to live by, and then the self in service to both. When the self tries to move to the top — to override principles, to replace God with its own agenda — everything below it destabilizes. But when the self takes its proper place in the order, there is peace, direction, and genuine strength.

The Plan Is for You to Be Whole

God has a plan for you. That plan is not suffering, not purposeless difficulty, not endless waiting. The plan is for you to be happy and usefully whole — today, in the life you actually have. Each moment you reach for God’s will instead of your own, you are shown the next step. Not the whole map — just the next step. That is enough.

Reach out. Trust. Let go of self-will one moment at a time. The enduring strength you are looking for is not something you build through more effort. It is something you access by placing yourself in right relationship with the Power that was already there.