This Month’s Message: A Long-Range Perspective

At the beginning of the Teaching, when Oyasama’s husband, Zenbei, was unable to agree to God’s request to receive Her as the Shrine of God, the following divine words were spoken:

“It is natural that you are filled with anxieties at present, but after twenty or thirty years have passed, a day is sure to come when all of you will admit the truth of My intention.”
The Life of Oyasama, p. 5

Let’s say we are driving across the United States from west to east. Having crossed the Rocky Mountains, we continue through a never-ending landscape of rocks and boulders. Even after driving all day, the scenery does not change. We may start to feel anxious and worried that the wilderness might continue forever.

The next day, however, small spots of green begin to appear here and there. Before we know it, we are driving across a grassy plain. Later, our field of vision may suddenly expand, allowing us to see the sea.

When we are going through a particularly hard time in our lives, we might feel disheartened imagining that this adverse situation might last forever. “That would be unbearable,” we think. We might even feel tempted to take a drastic measure. “I might as well die to put an end to all this.”

We tend to imagine that the situation we are in now will last long into the future, imagining that even ten years from now we will be more or less as we are now, surrounded by the people we are with now and living the same kind of life as we are leading now. Yet the simple fact is that none of this can remain the same that long. Just think about how different life is now compared with how it used to be when we were children.

When we stop and look around us, we may notice that the landscape of our lives has changed completely. Even a chance encounter may make such a huge difference in our lives that it is almost as if the theater stage has turned completely around.

Oyasama is taking into account what lies twenty or thirty years ahead—always looking far beyond the reach of our imagination. Even if the present situation is difficult, we can rest assured that we have nothing to worry about.

If we are going through a hard time now, we should remember that it can serve as a springboard for us to start a new journey.

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