Dear TSJ Friends and Encouragers,
Have you ever misplaced your keys? Have you learned that it is always in the last place you looked that you found them? Mr. John loves to playfully remind me that you will always find them in the last place you look! Of course – because you 
don’t have to keep on looking after you find them!
Today over my cup of tea, I am reflecting on where and how do we seek and find harmony when we feel it is lost or temporarily misplaced in our lives?
Sometimes the search itself is important. It is amazing what you can discover – even though you may be searching for your lost keys in the wrong place.
“Life happens,” so sometimes while you are looking for one thing something happens that distracts you from your search – unnless your are highly focused such as looking for the keys to your car and you are already late to work.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes while looking for one thing I find something great I didn’t even know I had lost! So the search creates opportunities to re-discover what we had forgotten we already had.
For me this is a spiritual truth. I have looked for answers to our anxieties, fears and heartaches through books, podcasts lectures, brain research, spiritual paths, psychological studies etc. and much has been very helpful, but left me realizing at times I have misplaced what I know in my soul already. More on this in upcoming blogs. Solomon is teasing me to write more on that topic!
This week, however, I am looking at the basics of examining our states of harmony. For me, these past two weeks have been filled with life’s gritty moments. That includes sadness (two touching funeral services in one week), hours of travel, moments of resetting my own inner compass, feelings that all is well only to be somewhat hijacked by a minor (but annoying) physical discomfort from a nasty sty in my right eye. A trip to Urgent Care was most helpful, but it means not only dealing with the pain and almost incessant itching of the sore, but having to take time to put hot packs and ointment on it four times a day! And I am constantly straining to see through the film the ointment and a cataract are causing in that eye..
But I am sure your days have some similar moments. Perhaps you are dealing with different kinds of “eye sores” (metaphorically speaking) this week. They may not be physical. But they may be little detours on your quest for happiness and harmony.
So let’s ask ourselves some questions.
What is Harmony?
For a quick definition I would suggest that ultimately harmony comes when our will is aligned with God’s will for us. One example that comes to mind is God’s command to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
What do YOU think harmony is? I welcome your comments. Please send them me at marg.m.cole@gmail.com!
What is out of Harmony?
And how do we restore it?
From here on I am going to include a long quote… as it sets the stage for our future reflections together in a way that bears sharing. The writer (Lable Braun) wrote this in a small pocket sized book I got years ago says this:
We are all searching for … our “key” to happiness. Our “key” to success. Our “key” to love. Our key to life itself. And too often we are … searching for our keys in the wrong places.
We have become a society that is obsessed with “answers.” We want answers to be definitive and immediate… to pop up instantly on our screen and for it to solve all our problems. We have delegated our questioning to others – to religion, to government, to academia. We’re not interested in the questions. ……But so few of the answers that our delegates offer seem to, in the end, bring us the happiness, success, love or life that we yearn for.
Why is that?
Keys and locks. Keys and locks.
We treat “answers” as if they were the keys to what we want. They aren’t.
The answers are the locks. They are [actually] what we are trying to open. When we treat an answer as a key, it’s like trying to open a lock with a lock.
[Questions are the keys to unlocking Knowledge]
But we don’t like questions. They seem to be … messy and murky…
We yearn for Harmony, but the flow of our lives crash[es] against the dams of our addictions…. and the log-jam of those addictions can only by broken by asking the perfect Quest-ion[s]“
What is out of Harmony in your life?
The other day – admittedly feeling out of harmony – I felt a deep need for divine guidance. I started singing, “Guide me O Thou Great Jehovah, lead me through this barren land. I am weak, but thou art mighty, Hold me with thy powerful hand…”
It really struck me that I believe in a personal God who loves us humans like we love our children. It is a God who is interested in the nitty gritty of being human. My tendency to avoid sharing this undermines my sense of harmony and exposes my lack of courage.
So I asked myself, Why is it so hard to share my experience of personal and loving, powerful, everywhere Present God? In our culture we (I) tend to more easily talk about things we call spiritual – “positive thoughts, the Universe, Higher Consciousness, Higher Power, Intelligence etc. but avoid calling God by name?
Yes, questions can be murky and messy! But asking them is key to discovering true Knowledge and Harmony in our lives.
Solomon has read this message and approves of it. He wants you to know there are more stories to tell … more questions to ask.
That is, after all, how Jesus handled all kinds of spiritual issues! … so stay tuned.
Margie and Solomon
