Recently, I heard this story and I am eager to share it with you. It is an amusing story about breakthrough: A young woman wanted to know everything about the mastery of life, nature and the universe. Most of all, because of emotional hurts, she wanted to know how to handle stress and emotional pain. She was obsessed with that idea and travelled to a guru who set her up in a cave, and gave her a lot of books to read and to study.

Every morning Guru came to check on her progress and asked: “Have you been reading?”

And she would reply: “O yes…”

“Have you learned the secret about the mastery of life, nature, and the universe yet? Have you learnt how to handle stress…”

“Not yet…” would be the reply, and Guru would lift a stick and strike her with it.

The pattern was the same everyday. Guru would come to the young woman in the cave, ask her the same questions and she would give him the same answer. She had not yet found the secret of successfully handling stress and Guru would strike her with a stick.

Until one day when he came into the cave and asked her the usual questions, and she gave the usual answer. And just as he was about to strike her with the stick, she reached up and grabbed it. Then she became a bit fearful about what would happen next.

However, she was shocked to hear Guru say: “Congratulations…you have found the answer…you have found the secret…”

Guru’s secret to mastery of life was this: “People who are traumatized must grab a hold of that which inflicts pain before it can strike.” The striking with the stick reflects the
stressful events that we allow to be inflicted on us, causing stress, pain and grief.

Careful consideration of Jeremiah’s account of the remolded pot in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 18), reveals that we harbour faulty, underlying patterns of thoughts and feelings, which produce errors in our lives and those patterns need to be broken down and re-molded by God.

We might never fully comprehend God’s way of adjusting us for He said that “His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts.” However, frequent communion with God and following through on His directions are the lubricants that oil the wheels of life and bring about change.

God’s adjustment principle purges, governs, regulates and corrects all things; and it is constant – never changing. And the aim of God’s adjustment principle is to conform us to become the persons He wants us to be – manifesting harmony, peace, love, goodwill and right living. However, God’s adjustment is a process, unfolding itself as time goes on.

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Breaking Through the Barriers
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Monica Hernandez, Ph.D. is author of the workbook “Breaking Through the Barriers.” This book can be a helpful resource to you in overcoming fear, instability, worry, anxiety, guilt, emotional hurts, depressive moods and other hurdles in your life. For more info, send email to info@newvisionministry.org

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