Meditation - Wishing Is Such a Futile Exercise

It's like trying to phone somebody who doesn't have a telephone. Now praying is another thing altogether. It works! “Seek and ye shall find ... ask and ye shall receive..." That, indeed, is another thing.

In my time spent as a lay chaplain in a hospital, I learned the truth of that. No amount of wishing could have helped to save the legs of the bitter woman who was brought in to have both of hers amputated. She went home with them still intact.

I also wonder why people waste time consulting horoscopes. In fact, many years ago — and I cringe at the very memory! — I was actually paid to write the ones that, together with a "lucky stone," were included in cans of coffee as a sales promotion.

Rather than “lucky,” I prefer to say "blessed." In my vocabulary there are no such words as ‘luck’ or ‘coincidence’. I have lived long enough now not to believe in either. Nor do I believe in ‘ships passing in the night’, either. I think that makes God too small. I believe that God is larger than mere chance and I believe that we meet, and things happen, by Divine Intervention. I agree that sometimes people one meets only briefly, inexplicably come along again some day, and become part of our lives. But what about brief encounters?

Each one of us, as we come into con­tact with one another, has a responsibility towards the other, whether we know it or not. Have you ever held a butterfly and noticed how some of its colour comes off in your hands? I’m sure you have. But you don’t even have to hold it; if it were just to fly too close to you, only brush your sleeve in passing, some of its ‘butterfly dust’ would have been left behind on you. In the same way, something of you would already have rubbed off on me, and you’ll go away carrying with you something of me. It may be a minuscule part, so small that you won’t know that it is there, but it will be. We may possibly forget that we ever met, but none of us will ever be quite the same again.