Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. – Erica Jong
I have often repeated this quote to my family. What happens when you spout quotes to the people you love, is that they often spout them back to you. This one was recently boomeranged back to me via my husband. At least I know that my family members are listening to me, I suppose.
I tend to get obsessive when I want a definitive answer to something that is bothering me. I look up every website that might even just have a word that will help me with a problem or an issue. It’s embarrassing to see even Google reminding me that I had just been at that same website two minutes ago or “you have visited this website many times.” Why is it that I know that nothing will be different on the website that I just visited 2 minutes prior and many times before that, but I’m still hoping for a different glean of knowledge?
I believe that we are designed by the Divine to have the answers within us. I’m a believer in prayer, but the older I get the more I realize that there is often a better plan for me and my situations than my limited vision sees. My prayer is more and more often, “Help me to know that the answers are already within. Help me go with the flow, knowing that everything is in accordance to Divine plan and help me to trust that knowledge.”
I watched a speaker recently who said that if we pray for patience, often we are going to get a long line at a bank. Experience is our teacher. God isn’t going to always swoop in and make things easy for us. We parents know how hard it is to watch our children struggle to learn to walk, and then to read, and then to drive and then to drive off towards lives of their own. We want to make it all easy for them, but we know it’s not for their best, so we sit on our hands, send our outpouring of love to them and know, in faith, that they are going to be okay. We know that they have all of the tools to handle life, right inside of them, if they get quiet enough to listen to their own inner wisdom.
I think that we must have a built-in internet, full of knowledge and understanding right at the click of our hearts. The good thing is that this “inner internet” doesn’t send us embarrassing reminders that we have been at this fork in the road 82 times already. Our inner wisdom has the patience to know that we will “get it” eventually, because we already “have it”. We just have to come to the acceptance of what we already know.