Be Happy Anyway

The prophet Nathan would come to King David every night and tell him, “This is what you did wrong today, what you said wrong today, whom you hurt today.” Can you imagine being confronted every night with every single transgression you committed during your waking hours? Most of us probably would not look forward to going to bed!

But King David was different. When he would hear these things, he would write a song of happiness. It brought him great joy to know what he had done wrong during the day because he understood that only with this information would he know what he needed to correct—and only with this information would he be able to reveal more of his potential in the world.

This story reminds us that the only way we can know what we have to change is by recognizing the place where the “other side” has infiltrated our personality. Recognition is the first step to our spiritual elevation. If we are open this week, then the universe will show us those aspects of ourselves that are blocking us from real fulfillment in our lives.

Think about it. When someone offends us, we become angry or short with them. When they say something we don't like, we are very quick to dismiss them as stupid or useless. Isn't it amazing, then, that the Creator doesn't do the same thing with us? The Creator always listens. The Creator always gives us another chance.

This week, let’s try to be like the Creator: to remain open and to listen to the difficult things about ourselves that are not comfortable to hear, that we would perhaps rather dismiss. We shouldn’t feel the need to kill the messenger; the messenger, after all, is there to help us. No matter what it looks like on the outside, as long as we have done everything that we can do to create a positive environment for ourselves, then anything negative that comes to us does so to teach us a lesson or to show us an aspect of ourselves that we need to evolve and change.

Mother Theresa once said, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” In a similar vein, oftentimes we want to change the whole world—with all of its problems—all at once. Let’s be content instead to change those small incremental things that we can change right now, even though science is showing us and kabbalists have said for centuries that our positive actions do have a quantum effect on the world.

So this week, let’s learn from King David to be happy when the universe shows us what we need to change so that we can overcome our blockages and come closer to the Light of the Creator.

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