Some thoughts on misery and faith

Warning: this post doesn't claim to solve any mysteries or make any grand claims. I hope it doesn't sound preachy. I only wanted to venture some insights on what is for some a very difficult, painful topic.

I have recently been reflecting on misery. I’m not talking about having a rough day, or a string of bad luck, here. I mean real misery – the kind that doesn’t go away, that doggedly follows you all your life; the kind of misery that makes you want to scream out, “Why am I like this?! What possible purpose could this serve?!” I’m talking about the kind of misery and the kind of trials that you’re dead sure are far worse than what most people go through, and that are so huge and insurmountable that they make you want to just give up.

Let me restate the principle question that got my wheels turning: What possible purpose could such immovable, unconquerable, overwhelming trials serve? This is, in my humble opinion, one of the most difficult questions of life. And I don’t pretend to have the answer, though many have been offered over the years, and I am sure there is some truth to most of them.

Still, they always seem a little insufficient. I mean, if we’re talking about questions like: why do people have to suffer? Or: why isn’t the world perfect? Or: what is the role of trials in life? Then yeah, most standard answers are usually sufficient and can provide enough context and perspective to help people deal with day-to-day hardships, or even a hard week or month or year. But what we’re dealing with here are the types of problems that probably won’t go away for the duration of one’s mortal experience. Someone who longs to find a life companion but who spends his or her entire life single and lonely; those who suffered abuse in childhood and must live with the scars for the rest of their life; those who feel endlessly confused or conflicted about their gender or sexual orientation; someone who cannot, no matter how hard he or she tries, overcome or change a debilitating personality trait or habit; those who suffer from severe, chronic depression; and the list goes on.

These trials are different in that they can severly impair one’s ability to find joy and happiness in life; and also in their longevity – most of them cannot be banished forever, and can only be moderated with the greatest of effort and personal exertion. They’re the kinds of problems that you do battle with every single day, and never feel like you’re making progress. They aren’t accurately described as a “rainy day”, or month, or year. They are the thorns in our sides that God sees fit, in some wisdom privy only to himself, not to remove.

It’s really hard to know why these kinds of trials, and the misery they inflict, are “allowed” in life. It seems they are simply too hard, too hurtful, too impairing, too unfair to be inflicted on anyone, no matter how you spin it. I don’t intend in this post to offer the magic response that will make everyone feel better, heave a big sigh, and say, “Ah, so that’s why!” Instead, I only want to offer an insight (or a series of them) that I’ve had recently that shed further light on the issue for me, that led me to a greater (if still very incomplete) understanding.

Through interactions and conversations with several friends over the past few months, I’ve come to recognize – slowly – that the key principles underlying this mystery are probably agency, grace, and faith – in order of importance. By agency I mean the freedom God grants us to choose what kind of life we will lead, and how we will act (or react) to what life throws at us. By grace, I mean the divine strength and enabling power that comes from Jesus Christ by virtue of his atonement in the garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. And by faith, I mean the active choice to believe in God, despite everything.

Agency is one of the fundamental principles on which this life operates. It sets us apart as individuals, in that we are – thanks to agency – the ultimate masters of our souls. On this board of directors there is only one member, who also happens to be the CEO. Agency gives us the freedom to decide who we are and who we want to become.

But it also sets limits on the ways and the extent to which God can intervene in our lives. This is because agency (the freedom and ability to choose between opposing options) is essential if we want to learn and grow. If our heavenly Father wants us to mature, he has to give us the necessary space – even if it makes us feel alone at times.

This conundrum isn’t unique to God: every parent faces it, in fact. Think of a parent with a toddler who is learning to walk. At first, the child’s father holds her hand, helping her gain a sense of balance and preventing her from falling. But there comes a time when the father has to let go and allow his daughter the space to try it on her own. If he doesn’t, she will always rely on him and never learn. But if he lets go, she is bound to fall and tears are inevitable. It is easy to see the fear, frustration, discouragement on the face of a toddler after a couple of falls.

A casual observer might characterize the father as uncaring, since he let his daughter fall and cry when it was clearly within his power to prevent it from happening. Obviously, he allowed his daughter to suffer. But in reality, the father’s helping hand was limiting her agency; she needed the freedom and space to try to walk on her own.

So then, if this analogy is appropriate, are we destined to go through life alone? No. Because the same principle that sets us on our own and makes us feel alone also provides the key to gaining God’s grace: his help, strength, and love. Again, it is agency – through the medium of faith.

And again, the analogy to the child learning to walk is instuctive: while the father must eventually let go and give his daughter space to learn (and fall) on her own two feet, he is never far away. In fact, he is as close as he can be without interfering with his daughter’s growth and impairing her ability to mature. And, if she looks to him and trusts him and listens to his encouragement, he can become an enormous source of strength and support, enabling her to get through this (from her perspective, at least) trying experience. And he does this without diminishing her agency.

The father’s help, support, and encouragement are analogous to God’s grace, except that the latter is infinite; it is an endowment that Jesus gained when he chose (again, agency at work) to suffer for us and in our place in Gethsemane and on the cross.

So why doesn’t he grant us infinite strength to vanquish our demons? Because receiving grace is conditioned on our asking for it, and God will never violate our agency. In other words, God cannot intervene in our lives until we invite him to do so. This requires we use our agency – asking him to help us is a conscious act – but in a specific way. We have to choose to believe in God, to trust that he will hear our prayers and answer them, and come to our aid when we most need him – even when he won’t give us proof of his existence and it’s sometimes hard to see his hand in our lives.

I guess what I’m trying to get at here, in a nutshell, is that trials – like them or not – force us to exercise faith. And exercising faith is an extremely important part of what life is about.

A word about faith here. I won’t try to delve deeply into the topic, as it’s worthy of volumes. But I want to point out something that often gets lost in our understanding of faith: it is an extremely active phenomenon, by its very nature. Exercising faith is very much that: it’s a workout. A spiritual workout. And often an emotional and mental (and sometimes physical) workout too. You don’t exercise faith simply by thinking – you have to act, and it requires a great deal of trust, diligence, determination, and – above all –  patience. Building faith is like building cardio-vascular endurance or muscle strength – it requires consistent effort, couple with the firm belief that what you’re doing will pay off, that it’s working.

Ironically, faith is what you most need when you feel like you have the least of it. When you’re at the end of your rope; when you can’t see much past the end of today; when you’ve just about lost all hope of ever being happy again, and the future has nothing in it worth living for; that is precisely when you need faith the most. The bright side is that you don’t need any faith to start building it. Just like building muscle strength, no one is so weak that they’re incapable of getting stronger. What you need, at first, is nothing more or less than a desire to believe. If that’s all you can muster, then act on it.

Again, faith is the key to accessing grace. And grace is the only thing that will get you through the kinds of trials I mentioned earlier.

So, to return to where I started: why are debilitating, insoluble, chronic, crushing trials and burdens allowed? And what purpose could they possibly serve? I don’t pretend to have a decisive answer. But one thing I know for sure: they provide us the opportunity (if we will choose to take it) to exercise faith and call on the grace of God constantly, daily, with everything we have.

This may not seem like a compelling reason, and it may not make you feel grateful to be dealing with what you’re facing. But at least consider this: developing that spiritual strength and maturity is crucial – now and in the future. It’s one of the major reasons we are here on Earth right now, instead of with God in heaven, where we were before. But that, of course, is a matter for a different post.

Dealing with pain: becoming like little children

Previously, I wrote a post about the link between pain and anger. I would like to add an insight I recently had on this subject, since it strikes at the heart of what it means to be human.

In that previous post, I asserted that anger arises from pain, and that humans react to pain by becoming angry. We do this because it distracts us from the pain and restores a sense of power following a moment of powerlessnes. Anger is a reaction, and I feel that all reactions are inherently inferior to actions, which are consciously enacted by an agent – someone who possesses the freedom and knowledge necessary to make her own choices. Actions stand in stark contrast to reactions, which are simply responses to stimuli. After all, you don’t even need a simple nerve net to react: plants and bacteria react all the time. Humans are unique in all the universe in their ability to act, yet we often forgo its usage and spend our lives reacting, like lesser creatures.

Anger is, in fact, one of the most destructive and harmful reactions of all. As I said earlier, pain inspires both sympathy and empathy, and urges others around you to come to your aid. Anger drives others away at precisely the moment you most need comfort and consolation. And I haven’t even mentioned the enormous damage you can inflict on others (and yourself) when you lash out in anger.

The alternative, however, is to endure the pain quietly and humbly, without seeking revenge or blaming others for your suffering, as if discovering who is at fault will make the pain magically dissipate.

This is terribly difficult, of course. Turning the other cheek is one of Jesus’ most controversial and difficult commandments. A wise friend of mine once asked me, “what do you do if you just can’t take it anymore? Sometimes the pain is just too much to bear.”

I’ve thought a lot about what my friend said, and was struck by a thought I had while taking a walk this morning. I realized that resorting to anger as a knee-jerk response to pain is a learned behavior. This isn’t something that we’re born with – we learn it as we go through life. It’s those damn offenses that we suffer every day, both small and not-so-small, that teach us to react that way.

The reason is fear: we’re afraid of pain, so we react in anger because we have learned that it lessens the pain and removes the awful sense of powerlessnes and hurt that comes when someone offends you – and by “offense” I am referring broadly to any action that causes someone hurt or pain. There are few teachers in life more effective than pain, and fear is the result of lessons learned. We learn to fear the things that caused us pain, and we develop strategies to cope with it; anger is one of the most powerful of these strategies.

So what am I trying to get at? I have always been fascinated, and even somewhat confused, by Jesus’ teaching to become like a little child. In both the New Testament and the Book of Mormon, he repeatedly insists that conversion to his way of life is tantamount to becoming like a child again, that it is a rebirth – involving necessarily an unlearning of some of the things we learned as we grew up and became adults. (See, for example, 3 Nephi 11:37 in the Book of Mormon, or Matthew 18:3-4).

Thinking about children and offenses (incidentally, right after exhorting his disciples to become as little children, Jesus goes on to teach about offenses), I realized that children react to offense without anger and without apportioning blame on others. They simply absorb the pain, and often simple sit down and cry. They don’t try to discover the cause of the pain, but rather to deal with the pain itself. A child knows no other way to react than to cry it out, and to reach out for his mom or his dad, or someone else nearby, to comfort him and help him make it through.

I realize now that Jesus’ words were more profoud than I had thought – that in this sense, we truly do need to become as children. And I would like to take children as our examples of how to deal with pain, in an attempt to respond to my friend’s question.

First of all, children teach us that the way to deal with pain is to cry it out, so to speak. I’m not advocating literally crying everytime we endure an offense of any kind. Nor am I trying to discourage understanding the painful situation in an attempt to minimize needless painful encounters in the future. But the ability to cry is cathartic and healthy, and in moments of serious pain there is nothing wrong with shedding tears. One of my greatest fears is to some day become so stone-hearted, so covered in callouses and scars that I lose the ability to cry. Of course, those who know me well know that this is an unlikely eventuality ;)

But far more important than simply crying it out, we need to learn how to reach out to others when we’re in pain, the way children do. Instead of focusing on who we can blame, we should focus on who we can ask for understanding and comfort. Despite being individuals, and even though life has a powerful tendency to isolate us from one another, we were not meant to go through this life alone. No one is strong enough to bear their burdens alone. We all need help. Indeed, I think one of the reasons God has created a world in which offenses abound is to give us the opportunity and need to reach out and help each other when we’re hurting.

Like the command to endure offenses well, without anger or retaliation (the “turn the other cheek” principle), the act of helping others through their trials and pain is also a core part of the Jesus’ teachings, and personifies the very heart and soul of Christianity. The parabol of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament, and the prophet Alma’s sermon at the waters of Mormon in the Book of Mormon are two examples. In the later case, Alma teaches that all Christians must be willing to bear one another’s burdens, mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort.

We don’t need to endure life’s pain, trials, and agonies alone. We shouldn’t try. Children don’t, they always reach out for loving arms in times of distress. We should reach out, first and foremost, to God, who possesses not only an infinite love for us, but also the power to heal our wounds and pour in balm. But we must not neglect our friends, either – many of whom stand willing to help if we but ask. In fact, it is often in wading through pain together that we learn to love and ties of friendship are strengthened. It is in being there for each other that relationships sink deep roots, allowing what might otherwise have stayed a superficial relationship to develop into real friendship.

Perhaps most of all, it is in serving one another, in being there for each other, and by reaching out to others when we need comfort, as little children do, that we slowly transform into true Christians – the kind of transformation Jesus was talking about when he urged his disciples to become as little children.    

The ultimate virtue

It is common, during moments when our patience is sorely tried, to hear someone say, admonishingly, “patience is a virtue.” I would like to rephrase this wise statement slightly: patience is the virtue.

Or perhaps, stated another way, patience is the ultimate virtue. With it, every other virtue becomes attainable, every trial is conquerable, and true strength is found. Without it, every virtue disappears, strength withers, and vices of all kinds, shapes, and flavors take their place.

Franz Kafka put it best. He said (and I paraphrase somewhat): “there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience we lost the Garden of Eden, and because of impatience we may never return.”

I first began to see the connection between patience and every other virtue – and its converse correlation: impatience’s link to every kind of sin – while thinking about the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Kafka must have noticed the same connection, because his quote resonated strongly in my mind when I read it.

This ancient and well-known story has never seemed quite complete to me, and I don’t think we generally understand it. As it is commonly told, God gave Adam and Eve two commands: not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; and to have children. But there is a contradiction in the two commandments – as they were stated above, Adam and Eve could not obey both forever. As long as they kept one, they could not keep the other.

Let me explain. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (myself included) believe that before we were born here on Earth, each of us lived with God as a spirit; the soul, in other words, existed long before it was joined with a mortal body through birth. It was God’s plan that we each obtain a physical body in addition to our spiritual one, and this was to happen by being born to a mother and father here on Earth. Adam and Eve were the first couple, and all the rest of us would gain a physical body through them or their children. Hence, the commandment to multiply and have children. So far, so good.

But unless they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve would remain in their innocent state, not able to tell the difference between good and evil. They were like little children, who have no comprehension of sex and the process of reproduction, let alone the mental, physical, and emotional maturity necessary to be a parent and raise children. So if they didn’t eat the fruit (commandment #1) then they would never be able to have children of their own (commandment #2).

Why would God give contradictory commandments? The answer is quite simple: he wouldn’t. He’s not dumb, and he doesn’t give commandments that are impossible to obey. Clearly, the story is not telling us everything – we’re only getting part of the picture. What I think God actually told Adam and Eve was: don’t eat the fruit of the tree yet. He knew perfectly well that Adam and Eve would eventually need to be able to comprehend good from evil. That was, after all, a core part of the whole plan he had put together. Understanding good and evil and learning to choose the good is at the core of what this life is all about. So why would God forbid it absolutely? It makes no sense. It seems pretty clear to me that God fully intended for Adam and Eve to eat the fruit eventually, but not right away.

Why couldn’t they eat the fruit right away? Good question. And I don’t know the answer for sure. But I have a couple guesses.

First, Adam and Eve needed to grow and increase in understanding before they could eat the fruit. You might be thinking, “wait a second! I thought you told me they couldn’t grow in understanding until they ate the fruit.” Good point. But just as a child grows in understanding very gradually at first, so perhaps did Adam and Eve. Even though a one-year-old doesn’t fully grasp what good and evil are, and has a very limited understanding of the world, he certainly knows and understands more than an infant who is, say, only one week old. Perhaps Adam and Eve needed a similar growth period before they could understand the consequences of eating the fruit of the tree. I mean, it would change their world forever – opposition would enter the story and the perfect world they had inhabited would become the imperfect one we all know so well. The God I know would never force anyone – let alone his own children – to make that choice without understanding what it meant. If Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree, it would be because they chose to do so.

Second, perhaps patience was the very lesson God was trying to teach Adam and Eve by telling them not to eat the fruit just yet. In essence, he was testing their ability to wait. After all, the fruit was delicious, and some of the consequences at least were very desirable. I mean, if someone else knows something that you don’t, it makes you want to know too, doesn’t it? Adam and (especially) Eve realized that there was a lot more to life than what they knew, and that eating the fruit was the key to discovering what that was. I even believe that God may have told them that eating the fruit was a good and necessary step for the plan to unfold – but that they were to wait until later to eat it.

What does all this have to do with patience, virtue, and vice? In essence, Eve’s sin – the first of all and, I believe, the archetype of all sin – was impatience. When she ate the fruit from Satan’s hand, she was saying to God, “I want this, and I want it now. I’m not willing to wait for you to give it to me when you think the timing is right.”

Similarly, nearly all our sins are impatience in some form or another. Take immorality, for instance. Sexual desire is neither virtue nor vice, in and of itself. It all depends on how and when it is acted upon. And it’s primarily a question of timing: sex with someone with whom you have not made sacred, solemn commitments is a serious sin; sex with that same person after making those solemn commitments (i.e. the commitments entailed in the marriage covenant) is not. Sexual sin, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of impatience. By the same token, virtue – immorality’s opposite – can only be found where there is patience enough to wait until marriage vows have been made.

Our ability to forsake sin and return to God’s presence after this life is predicated on cultivating patience. Without patience, we will never be able to return home to the paradise with God our Father that the Garden of Eden represents.

But patience isn’t only necessary to forsake sin. It is also essential to cultivate every virtue that we have a name for. This is in part because we are all imprefect beings and overcoming  our weaknesses and cultivating virtues in their place is a painstaking, slow process that requires persistent effort over time. In effect, it requires patience. But even more than that, every virtue incorporates patience into its very essence. Patience is the very fabric out of which each virtue is woven.

It’s like energy: almost every form of energy man knows how to exploit is, in essence, solar energy. Obviously photovoltaic solar panels use solar energy, but nearly all the other forms we’re familiar with do as well. Take wind power, for instance. The sun heats up the land masses and seas of the Earth at different speeds. This is because the specific heat of water is higher than that of rock or earth – meaning that during the day the land heats up faster than the oceans and seas, while at night the land cools faster. This temperature difference between land and sea gives rise to a corresponding temperature difference in the air directly above them, and masses of air with different temperatures have different pressures also. It is this pressure difference in adjacent masses of air that gives rise to wind, which we harvest for energy using wind turbines. So even wind energy is, essentially, solar energy. Similar arguments can be made for oil and natural gas too, which are solar energies at heart.

In the same way, all virtues are patience in essence, but in a different form. Take hope, for instance – in my mind one of the greatest virtues. Hope is more than mere wishing, it is believing in good things, and believing that good things will come. The realization of our hope is not instantaneous, obviously, or else there would be no need to hope at all. To hope, then, is to be patient. It is to accept a delay between our good, noble decisions, and the consequences that we firmly believe will follow from them. One cannot hope, therefore, without patience. And patience brings hope within reach.

With all the numerous ways in which we can do evil and hurt or harm others; and with the equally numerous virtues we can and must cultivate, it can seem overwhelming and even impossible to lead a good life by forsaking sin and cultivating virtue. Our attention is pulled in too many directions at once, and we never seem to make any real progress in any of them. So, for me at least, it’s comforting to greatly reduce the complexity of the picture and simply focus on one virtue and on discovering its applications in all areas of life.

Patience is the ultimate virtue.

Catching a cab in Amman

Life is like trying to catch a cab in Amman during rush hour.

This epiphany struck me just the other day while I was trying to just that. For those of you who haven’t been there, Amman in the capital city of Jordan, a small desert kingdom in the Middle East, definitely a developing country without oil or water or much of anything else to support itself. The city itself is a sprawl of similarly constructed buildings without any discernible planning or organization. There is no mass transit to speak of – the buses have no published routes or scheduled times, nor are there any official bus stops. You just figure out generally where they go and hail one that you think is headed in your direction, and get off when it seems to have decided to go elsewhere.

I don’t use the bus; I prefer taxis. They are extremely cheap compared to American cabs, and they are ubiquitous throughout the city. But they have their problems too. They are very well-used, since there is little alternative to getting around, and thus during rush hour 99% of them are full. And their drivers are a diverse and eccentric lot, to say the least. I met one who was a Canadian-educated engineer who spoke perfect English (don’t ask me why he was driving a cab); I’ve had many others tell me to cross the street and get a cab over there because I was headed in that direction and they didn’t want to have to turn around. Others have been alternately friendly, full of advice or admonition, or just plain rude. Many have tried to cheat me out of a lot of money (up to 10 times what the fare should have been), taking advantage of the fact that I was new to the city and didn’t know the ins and outs of cabs and where everything is located in the city. In brief, in four short weeks I have had the gamut of experiences with cabs in Amman.

One more thing about getting a cab in Amman. During rush hour, like I said, the cabs are nearly all full. And those who aren’t full typically don’t want to pick you up. I have no idea why. Plenty of guesses, but no real answers. The real answers probably vary widely anyway. The upshot is that you can wait – along a busy road, even – for 30 minutes or more with your hand out before a cab will stop to pick you up. I have seen literally hundreds if not thousands of cabs drive past me before one stopped to take me back to my apartment. And very often, after stopping, as soon as the driver sees who I am and hears me tell him where I want to go in my imperfect Modern Standard Arabic (rather than the local dialect, which I am only slowly picking up and have never studied) he shakes his heads, waves his hands at me and drives away, leaving me standing there like a fool who has no idea what just happened or why.

Let me share something about myself: I don’t like being rejected; I don’t like being made to look like a fool, or like I got duped because I’m some naïve, kid who is easily taken advantage of. But what I hate most of all is to have that happen while lots of other people are watching. I think everyone fears rejection, but I fear it more than most, and I’m absolutely terrified of others watching me get rejected.

The reason I’m telling you this is that I have to face exactly this fear every day after class when I want to go home. I’m tired, somewhat depressed from a hard day learning a hard language, and I want to retreat to the quiet, contemplative sanctuary of my apartment. Instead, I have to stand on the side of a very busy road with my hand out getting rejected by literally hundreds of taxis – all the while getting gawked at by everyone – those in their cars, those in the cabs, and those walking past me along the road. I mean, I’m the foreigner who looks lost and probably doesn’t know his way around – an easy target for stares.

It’s hard. Let me tell you, there are times when I wonder if I will ever get a cab, if this ordeal will ever end and I’ll ever get home. And when I finally do catch a cab (thirty long minutes later), I never know if I’m going to have to fight tooth and nail in a language I don’t speak well not to get totally ripped off and cheated. You just never know what’s going to happen when you try to catch a cab in Amman.

So how is this like life? In lots of ways. First off, it requires serenity of spirit and mind, and a great deal of patience. I remember a day when I lacked both, and after 10 emotionally abusive minutes in which several cabs rudely and condescendingly told me to cross the street because their cars happened to be pointed the wrong way at the moment, I stormed away, angry and hurt, to find some meager degree of privacy where I could recover and get ready to try again. Other days I’ve had serenity and patience, but boy could I feel how much I was using and needing both.

Getting a cab in Amman is also unpredictable, just like life. You never know what kind of cab driver you’ll end up with – could be a jerk; could be completely indifferent and silent; could be extroverted and talkative; could be friendly, caring, and interested. He could try to cheat you for all your worth. Or he could treat you with perfect fairness – or more.

Some of these experiences are unpleasant or downright hurtful. I hate being cheated, but far more than that I hate the feeling I get when I know the person across from me is trying to cheat me – that he or she has malicious, hurtful intent, and that it doesn’t even bother them to feel that way about me, someone they have never met before. I hate having to get in their face, stand my ground, and call them out on their lies and mean-spiritedness. I hate calling people out on their bad behavior – it embarrasses them and therefore embarrasses me.

So I’ve come to hate taking taxis in Amman, because I’m afraid of those hurtful situations. I’m afraid of the public rejection and I’m afraid of interacting with people who bear me ill will – who are actively trying to hurt me and treat me poorly. In fact, I dread going to class in the morning (when it’s much easier to get a cab, and they tend to be nicer) because I know that if I do I will have to go through the ordeal of trying to get a cab home in the evening.

Getting a cab in Amman has therefore taught me this life lesson: because life is unpredictable and you never know when you’re going to have a hurtful encounter you have to put some space between your feelings and others’ actions. Even if the person across from you is trying to hurt your feelings, you can’t let them. You have to create a buffer between their intent and your reaction that absorbs the venom and neutralizes it before it reaches your heart. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself fearing and avoiding life because of the fear of being hurt. What a tragedy that would be, fearing life while living it!

Finally, getting a cab in Amman during rush hour has reminded me that life isn’t all bad! The other day, after 20 or 30 minutes of watching people stare at me as I stood there with my hand out, supplicating for a taxi, one finally stopped. When I got in, I immediately knew I had lucked out. He understood my less-than-perfect Arabic, knew where I wanted to go, and then asked me where I was from. We had a friendly conversation for the length of the ride. It was obvious he was doing more than making conversation; he was legitimately interested, and I could feel the goodness of his intentions. He corrected my Arabic mistakes and told me about himself as well. When we reached my apartment he asked for no more than what the fare ought to have been. I had a broad smile on my face and said a sincere “thank you.” He said goodbye using my name, and really meant it.

I had a glow in my heart that after that encounter that lasted all evening and that erased all the weariness and uncertainty of the day. Life is like that. You have to take it as it comes. But there are wonderful encounters ahead of you, mixed in with less pleasant ones. The trick is not to fear, but rather to hope. It is in becoming strong enough to endure the offenses of life, with an attitude of hope for the marvelous encounters that fill it with light, that makes life beautiful.