Keep the camera rolling. Don't call cut just yet because we never know where we are in the story.

And of course, when we watch really good movies, a good movie by definition has lots of unexpected and surprise twists and turns.

So the plot line is all over the place, it seems. And then usually in the third act,

it all starts to come together. And you start to see why the person was struggling so much earlier

because it was teaching them something that was going to come into play down the line. And you see

why they were betrayed or why they were stolen from

and how all of it fed into the ultimate goal. And the invitation with us, since we're not in a

fictional movie, we're in what we think was real life and that this life has real consequences

and you can't reverse time. The invitation for us is to adopt the mindset from a spiritual perspective that we are also here

for purpose that may be slightly or a lot different than the one that we think we're here

for.

Society indoctrines us all to feel that we're here for some material sense,

for a professional reason, or to achieve some goal in this season of our life. From a spiritual

perspective, there may be some truth to that. For this season of my life, my objective is to make sure that my family is taken

care of. My objective is to make sure that I have a place to stay or live. And while I'm doing all of

that, I am also learning things that are helping me to become more compassionate down the line,

more generous, more empathetic, more patient, more selfless.

Now, in order to properly become those things, those softer skill attributes, in order to

grow into those, there's really only one way for it to become embodied.

And usually it's from me having some judgment around the opposite of those things. Perhaps because that's what my parents displayed. My parent was selfish. My parent lacked compassion. My parent lacked patience with me. And I judged them for that. And I swore that I would never be like my parent. How many of us have thought that to ourselves? Probably all of us. I'll never be like them in this particular area. She's always late. I'm always going to be on time. He's never present. I'm always going to be there with my kids. And then you find yourself getting into situations later in life where somebody sees you as the very thing that you saw your parent as.

And maybe you don't even realize it until much, much later.

And of course, when it gets brought to your attention, you don't see yourself that way.

...