God Himself came to my dream and I asked him this stupid question! (#4 of 10)

God always fulfils his promise. And as He promised, He came to my dream for a fourth time for me to ask yet another question. Our conversations so far have been very enlightening and God always leaves me speechless and with so much reflection to do.

But this time when He came to my dream, I did not have any question.

In the real world, things recently have not been how I would like them to be, and unfortunately I could do nothing about them. Hence, rather than asking a question, I was just standing there reflecting upon everything that has been happening around me.

For quite some time, God kept looking at me with His heavenly gaze, but the silent monk was more silent than ever. Eventually as He always does, God smiled in the most pleasant manner and said the following:

My dearest Monk,

Don’t you have a question for me today?

Always remember, I have an answer for every question that you ask, and even for the questions that you don’t ask!

I could not help but smile the way He said these words. He sure does have a sense of humor. He very well knew what question I had in my mind, yet He wanted to hear from me. Hence, I played along, and asked the following —

Dear God,

The moment I feel I am beginning to understand life, life throws in a curve ball and I am back to square one.

Sometimes I feel everything in life is under control, and at times I feel the exact opposite. How circumstances change within a matter of minutes is something that I never understand.

Can you please tell me what are the things that I control in life, and what are the things I do not control in life?

The moment I finished my question, God smiled and very politely replied the following:

My dearest monk,

We often are under an illusion that we control everything in our life. In reality, we only control a small number of handful things.

Did you control whether you were born in a rich household or a poor household, a Christian household or a Buddhist household, a Black household or a White Household? When you will fall in love, and when you might experience heart break due to no fault of your own, you control nothing of it!

The only thing we control is how we react to situations that we are put into — be it good situations or bad situations. When put into the worst of situations, do we react in a righteous manner? And when enjoying the best of circumstances, do we retain our humility or not?

The good or bad situations life is going to throw at you is often something that you cannot control.

On similar lines, our success and failure is not in our hands. Only thing we can do is put in our hard work and then accept whatever results we get out of it.

I nodded in agreement to everything He said. But was a bit confused as well. Why did God say that my success is not dependent on my hard work? Does this mean I should just stop working hard?

Seeking more clarity on this, I then asked Him on a lighter note — “So do you mean that how many views I am going to get on my Medium articles has nothing to do with my hard work?”

I ask stupid questions to Him, but this was one notch higher. Yet He took it pretty seriously and explained in great detail —

My dearest monk,

Should you not be asking Tony Stubblebine this question?

But anyways, you are partly correct!

You cannot decide what articles will work and what will not. What you have to do is to just keep writing. The same goes for each and everything in life.

Let me explain this by taking two articles of yours as an example.

https://medium.com/@thesilentmonk/my-conversation-with-time-and-4-critical-life-lessons-i-learnt-from-him-b60252f39217https://medium.com/@thesilentmonk/my-conversation-with-time-and-4-critical-life-lessons-i-learnt-from-him-b60252f39217

I read both articles and loved both of them. But I also know what went behind writing those articles.

The first article is a conversation with Time, and you struggled for two days to come up with the thought process and storyline behind this article. You went on a long walk, and then sat on a beach for two hours just to prepare the storyline for this article. This is truly one of your best works. And when you published this, only a handful of people read this.

The second article, you just woke up one day and while preparing your morning tea you had this thought, and you wrote it within 2 hours. Comparatively, a lot more people read and appreciated this article of yours.

An article where you spend most effort does not necessarily gives you the best results. Similarly in life, you cannot always control the fruit of your labor.

But what is important that you must keep writing and wait for the magic to happen some day. Similarly, in life, you just have to keep striving forward without keeping results in your mind.

I would not say I completely understood what God had to convey, but I had gotten enough to reflect upon it. Also, I could hear the 4 AM alarm clock ringing in the background. But before I could wake up, God said the final words for the dream —

My dearest monk,

Before you wake up and write an article about this, please tell Jenny Lane and Mbhango Lefoka that I have received their question they asked after reading our previous conversation.

Please do tell them I shall answer their question pretty soon!

With this, the dream ended. I woke up and began writing this article.

P.S. This concludes #4 of a 10 part series. Also, here is a link to all the articles in this series. The fifth story of the series is as below:

https://medium.com/@thesilentmonk/my-conversation-with-time-and-4-critical-life-lessons-i-learnt-from-him-b60252f39217

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