Challenges not from God.

When you face challenges in your own life, it is easy to wonder whether those challenges were placed intentionally by God or some other life force as a means of growing. The answer is that those challenges you face belong naturally to what life as human beings encompasses. Challenges, roadblocks, frustrations of any kind are not given to you specifically by God in order to learn a vital lesson.

Human beings are not perfect. The decisions of human beings affect other human beings, and as you so clearly understand, they also affect your environment—weather patterns, the availability of resources. Anything you do as human beings, whether a direct expression of your spirit center or not, has an impact on life around you. That impact may be positive or negative. This means, of course, that you then in turn experience what may be positive or negative possibly as a result of the actions of others. Those kinds of challenges are the result of being human, but it is God who equips you in your own particular way to find a means of response that is appropriate, and in exercising that appropriate response, you grow, becoming broader and deeper and more sensitive. God, therefore, is not the cause or the force of intention but rather is the strength that provides a response.

You do learn, you do grow, you do develop as human beings in your ability to be loving and supportive through those experiences. God does not cause the experiences. God does not intend those experiences to be sent your way, but God allows for those challenges to take place.

Many of those challenges are not directly the result of human action or interaction. Some challenges may be what you would call “acts of nature.” God created the natural world, and you are very much a part of that creation, but all that exists also has a capacity to respond. The proverbial stone responds to heat and cold, temperature, light, all forms of energy. Everything has an ability to respond at some level. There is nothing that God has created that is totally inert.

As a result, you experience moments in your life when you are very much aware of some kind of natural response taking place. The stone does not respond to the warmth of sunlight because of something that humans did. The stone responds because the stone is and light is. Light is energy, and the stone responds to that energy with its own energy.

Your human experience can be observed in some fashion as an awareness of the response of anything and everything around you. That response being a natural response can have an impact upon human life that is difficult, tragic, and in many ways destructive. But that response can also be in every way supportive—supportive in terms of nutrition, supportive in terms of chemical responses, supportive in so many different ways.

Never assume that God causes something to happen for the purpose of teaching a lesson, for that never happens. But you have been created in such a way that you can respond in ways that are beneficial. Those benefits may not be evident for a long time, but the potential is nevertheless there. You grow through your response to what is done. Nothing is done for the purpose of eliciting some response from you.