There is a story among the Arabs, that when Moses was going to Mount Sinai, he saw a man praying, and this man asked Moses, “Are you going to communicate with God?” Moses answered, “Yes,” The man said, “Will you ask about me? I have prayed all my life, but throughout my life I have been in difficulty. I feared God, I was always kind to man and yet what have I got? Nothing. A hard life always, nothing else.” Moses said, “Yes, I will ask about it.” When Moses had gone a few steps further, he saw a man who was fully drunken. The man called, “Come along, come here, Moses. Will you take my message to God and ask him what he thinks about me?” Moses was amused and he took the messages of these two men. Naturally the answer was, “Moses, you know our law. Naturally this man who has prayed all his life, he will have the reward and this man who has been drunken all his time, will have his punishment.” Moses comes back and tells this man, “Be sure and be happy. All you have done will be rewarded.” “I have no doubt,” he said, “I am sure, I have always done good, God will not forget this.” When Moses comes to the other man, he says, “You have well enjoyed your life, for you there is the worst place.” The man said, “Yes? I am so happy. I don’t mind where God puts me. But that God thinks of me! I think, there is nothing better for me.” Then he began to dance, he was so happy. The result was that these two men were quite in the contrary place than where Moses had expected them to be . And Moses asked God, “Why is so?” The answer was that all the virtues of this man were wiped away by that thought of conceit, “Yes, I deserved it.” Since that moment all his virtues were wiped away. The other man, he thought, all the punishment there is he deserved it, his only happiness was that he was remembered by the Lord . This gives a picture. There is law and yet there is something beyond law and that is love.
I have heard people say that, “I am ill,” or “I am suffering,” or “I am going through a difficulty,” or “Things go wrong because of my karma of the past.” I say, “If it is so or if it is not so, your thinking about it makes it still more worse, everything that one acknowledges to be, it becomes worse because one acknowledges it.” That karma which could be thrown away in one day’s time, by acknowledging it will keep with a person all his life. Some people think that they suffer or that they go through pain according to the law of karma. But when the thought of the grace of God comes and when one realizes the real meaning of the grace of God, one begins to rise above it, and one begins to know that, “My little actions, good actions, my good deeds, all my good deeds I must collect in order to make them equal to God’s mercy and compassion, his grace and his love he gives at every moment.” One moment of God’s compassion cannot be returned by all life’s good actions. The relation of God and man apart, can one return a real thought of love, all a friend has done to us? We can love that friend, his loving kindness and his compassion but we can never pay for it. In all our life we cannot pay it. And when we see the kindness and the compassion of God which is always hidden from our view because we are always seeing what is lacking, the pain, the suffering, the difficulties. Man is so absorbed in them that he loses the vision of all the good that is there. We can never be grateful enough, if we see like this, that it is not the law, but it is the grace of God which governs our life. And it is the trust and confidence in this grace which does not only console a person, but which lifts him and brings him nearer and nearer to the grace of God.
God bless you!
from a speech of Inayat Khan
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