When a person feels a strong need to defend a philosophical or religious position, there is often considerable ego involved. Sometimes it is simply evangelizing, but more often in my experience it is the need to be right. I think many times the need to be right represents the need for validation of the person’s beliefs. If they were more grounded and more secure in their beliefs, perhaps they would not feel such a strong need to defend them. Thankfully, I have relinquished the need to control what other people think of my viewpoints. If there is something positive, they can gain from them, that is great. If not, I would be wasting my time and breath trying to convince them of anything.
Our belief systems are so ingrained in us that any change is often slow and laborious, short of epiphanies which I don’t expect happen all that often. Being open to change is a fundamental prerequisite for expanding our spiritual awareness. It is rather like the millennium of time required for water to eat away at stone river bottoms, washing away ingrained beliefs slowly but surely as Spirit awakens our dormant recollections of where we come from and our purposes in life. Be ever watchful for the fragments of harder stone, slower to erode than the rest, blocking our evolving views of reality as it is.
A person can become too comfortable in their belief systems, resistant to change and complacent in spiritual expansion. I have been that person, and I vow never to be so again. My mind and heart are open to receive God’s wisdom wherever it may be beckoning from. I am the stone, and God is the water gently shaping my future.
If we are open to possibilities, bits and pieces of knowledge and wisdom will be revealed to us in both likely and unlikely places. It is the unlikely ones that we must be most watchful for, tending our opportunities for reaching beyond where we have been before, soliciting the greater good.
