Time and Opportunity

All things in the universe have their proper time and place. When all is in accord, we have goodness- evil is when things are out of balance. Our cultures seek to define good and evil based around patterns recognised in this- evil being harmful action, sin being ‘wilfully’ harmful. The essence of timing is a primal law which, once discovered, leads to a full understanding of what is the right thing to do at any given time. It can indeed be discovered through the divine agency of our deepest instincts, whose urgings can guide us flawlessly on this path, or back onto it if we should stray from it.

God has not left us alone. Contrary to certain popular misconceptions, our very deepest urgings are those in tune with the divine, whilst more surface imaginings tend to distract from it. In this way we can know that we truly have a divine nature and origin, even if our surface personalities often fail to reflect this accurately.

Just as a tree is distorted by ripples in a pond, so also our inherent nature is often obscured by who we appear to be. We may often feel that what we do is not the real us, that we are trapped by habits, by fears of change, that keep us ‘in check’.Yet, the difficult thing here is that, from a more direct perspective, we are what we do… fallen or risen, our actions, that which we chose, define us. It is up to us whether or not we live up to the divine blueprint, it is up to us whether we attain to the holiness for which we were designed.

The joy of victory...
The agony of defeat.

These emotional states define all of human existence, they form the very pathways of moral and spiritual progress.
The seed of man must grow in it’s fullness, it is worthless lain dormant.
It grows through efforts, through righteous, self-sacrificing efforts, guided by right understandings.
As you may have guessed by now, there is far more at stake than mere clever understandings of the workings of the universe- more than a cynical appreciation of the ways of the world.
Such adaptations may well bring some semblance of comfort, yet they can also lead to shallow pools of the spirit in which inspiration is ever harder to find.
We are defined by our highest urgings, by following the same…
We can only truly do this if we are sincere.

God sees into our hearts, he sees the impulse behind the action, the true intentions.
He is not fooled by pious words and deceptive ways.

God sees truth. God awakens truth in us.
Truth is an action, truth is a way of being and doing. Truth is what really is, shorn of attendant illusions.
Truth is that tree seen clearly,
Which of course implies that truth is in accord with a whole host of other attributes that we value-
Beauty,
Clarity,
Glory,
Success,
Harmony
Valuable-ness.

When we appreciate just how important Truth is, and how closely related it is to our own sincerity (a point both obvious and easily overlooked)… far more so than to coldly discovered laws. For God has enough power to rescue our sincere intentions from the dark ways of the world and see them bear their intended fruit, however far in the future this may be.

For no good sincere word is ever forgotten,
No kind deed overlooked,
No heartfelt sigh unheard,
No helpful smile ignored.

So, contrary to the ways of the world, we can see that the ultimate victory is that of kindness. Kindness is not ever failing, being merely temporarily suppressed by the foolishness of the crude.

A spiritual victory may or may not translate into a material one. Yet it is an essential victory. Good comes of it, at times a good we can scarcely see. So here we come to the crux of our point… a point concerning the valuableness of sincerity, even in a world in which such sincerity might seem silly or foolish or even naive and childish…

Sincerity is always reflective of the good in us, or it is not our real sincerity at all…

AND

Sincerity always bears good fruits, better, more luscious ones than those of merely ‘good habits’.

So let us dare to be sincere, dare to care and to show our love in appropriate, yet significant ways.

Despair not, it is possible to be good in the world, if we time our goodness to appropriate manners of expression, appropriate to our position, relative to where we are.

Happiness, that which we want most of all, comes from goodness and goodness from sincerity.
We help ourselves the most when we are true to ourselves, when we help others the most.

It’s a beautiful simplicity, one which should inspire in us hope and faith.

Amen.