Many Americans today of all ages are subjected to tremendous social and economic pressures. Such stress has been associated with the dissolution of families, substance abuse, emotional distress, mental illness and numerous other social ills.
Change in itself is stressful. When it comes at a moderate pace, however we can more easily make adjustments with a minimum of discomfort. But with abrupt change one is more likely to experience intense stress or emotional disorder.
At the very core of much today’s stress we will find the tests of gross materialism in every segment of society, perpetuating attachment to worldly things which begets fear and anxiety, prejudice and animosity, apathy and lethargy. What would best help us toward managing and even surmounting the stress commonly associated with modern life is the understanding of the purpose of tests.
Tests are necessary to reveal to us our own weaknesses – for God already knows them. Were it not for tests the genuine could not be distinguished from the counterfeit, the courageous from the coward, and the weak from the strong.
“Tests do not come to us by chance,” we’re told in the Baha’i Holy Writings, “They are sent to us for our own perfecting. When a man is happy he may forget his God. But when trials come and sorrows overwhelm him then will he remember his Father in heaven Who alone can deliver him from his humiliation.”
No one can pass from one grade to another without tests or from on physical, mental or spiritual state to another without tests.
But for tests one may forget to “Lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth…” (Ps 121:1-2)
I was blessed to witness such spiritual strength in my own mother who experienced every conceivable humiliation while upon this earth in sickness and amputation of one leg and part of the other. Yet she never whimpered but clung tenaciously to such Holy Scriptures as: ‘Not that I speak in respect of want; for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” (Philippians 4:11) She didn’t just memorize it. She lived it.
The world today is suffering from lack of exposure to such spiritual strength, which can come only through the chastening rod of tests. Only through spiritual transformation can we possibly provide such demonstration. They physical fitness and cosmetic industries are $multi-billion businesses as we place no limits to whatever we feel or are told will keep us physically fit and attractive, all of which ends with earlier and earlier graves. Yet our spiritual reality remains weak and underdeveloped, evidence by our inability to cope with the most insignificant tests. Subsequently as this old world order collapses, all those socially and emotionally attached to it will be rolled up with it.
Through spiritual transformation, no harm will beset us in times of tests, and in moments of heedlessness, our steps will be guided through Thine inspiration.
“O ye lovers of God,” we are admonished in the Baha’i Holy Writings, “make firm your steps in His cause in such wise that ye shall not be shaken, though the direst of calamities assail the world! By nothing, under no conditions, be ye perturbed.”
Investigate!
