Cruise Control

I sort of slammed the phone down.  Well, put it down hard and felt a bit guilty.  It wasn’t the person at the other end’s fault, he wasn’t in control. And neither was I. And therein lay the rub of it. My great plans were temporarily on hold; hopefully just for another few days, but I had been starting to feel those little tentacles of control, masquerading as organizational skills, digging into me. I was on edge and irritated.

Hashem, I’m trying to doing chessed, a kind deed, why are You preventing me?  It’s been so frustrating. I sit down to think about it. In fact, on several occasions when I tried to help this person, there was always some delay, some obstacle, something that didn’t quite go according to plan, some suffering they had to endure and I was starting to feel anger and, let’s be honest fellow pursuers of emuna, I was angry with Hashem; not explosive anger, just low level. Can’t You, Hashem, give this person a break, and give me a break as well? But I was being thwarted and so I am minded to go back to the basics of emuna: that this too is part of Hashem’s plan, that it is for the person’s best and my best, and that our respective souls need rectification.
 
It’s a hard pill to swallow, to watch someone you care for suffer. Even if it’s not life threatening; you want the best for them, to do the best for them. And so you make your best effort, and usually it works out, but you start to feel you’re in the driver’s seat, in control about the outcome, even though you ask Hashem for help and thank Him for His help.
 
Hashem, I know my ego is inflating, it’s telling me that I know best, not You. My cousin says to me, Yael, you seem to have that type of personality that goes with the flow. Actually, I say, I have to work on it. And, yes, I can pat myself on the back occasionally when I look back of the past few years and wonder how on earth I negotiated the dramas that have taken place in my life. But really I see that actually I couldn’t have emotionally survived any of them without Hashem’s help and that even all my personal talents are from Hashem even though I have free will as to how to use them.
 
And as I reflect some more, I realise that those times when I was prevented from achieving something, it was for a reason, and that the desired outcome didn’t always manifest itself until sometime later.  A couple of years ago, I felt I needed connection to women from a more Torah environment, maybe chassidish, maybe someone to learn with and to learn from, I wasn’t sure what. I thought about a particular community and made enquiries through someone who hailed from that part of the city. He said most of the women he knew worked and probably wouldn’t have the time. So I gave up on the idea. While my father, of blessed memory, was in hospital a few months ago, he spent two weeks in intensive care and during that time another family [whose father z’l was also in intensive care], chassidish, from the very neighbourhood I had in mind a couple of years ago, befriended us, and I am still in contact with the daughters and daughters-in-laws of this holy family of "bnei Torah". Hopefully these relationships will flower, with Hashem’s help; they already give me spiritual strength. It only occurred to me a few weeks’ ago that in fact Hashem seemed to have answered my prayers.  I just had to wait a couple of years to be answered.
 
So Hashem sees things from a different perspective, from His perspective of what each soul has to do in this world. No thought or desire is hidden from Him and he takes into account all the details of each person’s circumstances because He created them and they all have purpose.
 
Sometimes our plans go smoothly and we are grateful, but we also have to be careful not to take things for granted, not to assume that this will always be the case.  And when we hit the bumps in the road, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that we are the ones who have to be able to make things right, in our way, at our time. Let’s try our very best, and once we have done everything we feel we can, and still we confront obstacles, just go onto cruise control, relax and let Hashem take the strain.