By Rebecca
I am now nearing the end of the fifth decade of my life. When I look back, I can clearly see that I squandered a huge amount of my years on things that I now find unwholesome and that no longer resonate with me. I can also clearly see that I have spent relatively little of my life so far being, doing and living in a manner that I now know to be truly worthy. Much of my life so far thus really does seem to me now to have been a sheer waste.
After I came to this realization, for a long time I blamed my late parents for it. In my mind, I came up with all sorts of errors of omission and commission that I accused them of. The crux of my complaint against my parents was this: If only they had given me proper guidance, as good parents ought to, my life would have taken a much better course. My parents, I sought to convince myself, had failed very badly in providing me the sort of guidance that a child needs, because of which, according to me, they were to blame for much of all that had gone wrong in my life.
But just a very short while ago—earlier this very morning, in fact—a thought came to me that suggested that my cherished explanation for my wasted years was actually wrong. It was not lack of appropriate parental guidance as such that was the basic cause of my having wasted much of my life so far. Rather, the basic cause was my never caring to seek or listen to God’s guidance for and in my life, even in my most difficult times. This being the case, it was I who was actually to blame for much of the mess in my life for which I had blamed my parents. Even while in many ways having been deprived of good parental guidance, I could, I now understand, have avoided making a mess of things had I had turned to God and sought His guidance as I navigated my life, including during the most stormy parts of my journey.
I now think: It is God's guidance, and not merely the guidance of one’s parents (or of some other person like a mentor or a wise elder), that we need in order for our lives to turn out truly well. After all, by virtue of being human, even the best parents are fallible, and so, even they cannot be expected always to provide the best guidance. Because they are human, even the best parents will, at least some time or the other, make mistakes and provide poor guidance to their children. Perfect guidance can only and always be expected from The Perfect One—that is, God. Parental guidance, though important and necessary, simply cannot replace God’s guidance.
This being the case, I now think: Had I bothered to seek God’s perfect guidance as I went through life and had I respectfully listened to this guidance when it came to me and acted accordingly, surely it could have prevented me from doing many things, pursuing many obsessions and wasting many years that I now regret and feel awful about. Surely, I could have then used my time and other resources in a much better way and my life would have assumed a very different course.
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I do not know much about the subject but perhaps it is that God provides us guidance at every moment, at each step of our lives (although whether we heed this guidance is an entirely different matter). Perhaps this guidance is made available to us in many different ways, such as in form of the inner voice, the conscience and flashes of intuition, as well as situations, circumstances and events that God arranges for us to meet with and people that He sends our way. Perhaps it is also that God also provides us His guidance at any moment and for any matter when we explicitly ask Him for it by sending approriate thoughts into our mind in response to our request.
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We are free to choose to access God’s guidance and do as He prompts us to, but we are equally free to choose to decline to do so. Either way, one thing is for sure—the choice we make in this regard will make the most momentous difference to how our lives turn out to be.