If you have difficulties ahead ….
January 17, 2008
This story is about a flowing stream that ran into a desert.
This stream, the story teaches, worked itself across the country for agesand experienced little difficulty. It ran easily around the rocks and quickly through the mountains. No obstacle, it seemed, was too much for this fresh and life-giving water.
Then, suddenly, it arrived at a desert.
Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, the waters disappeared. After many attempts, the stream became very discouraged. It appeared that there was no way it could continue the journey.
Then a voice came in the wind. “If you stay the way you are, you cannot
cross the sands. In fact, you will only become a quagmire. To go further,
you will have to lose yourself.”
“But if I lose myself,” the stream cried, “everything I have ever been will be
lost.”
“Oh, on the contrary,” said the voice. “If you lose yourself, you will
become more of what you were meant to be than you ever dreamed.”
So the stream surrendered itself to the hot, drying sun. And the clouds
into which it was formed were carried by the raging wind for many miles.
And once it crossed the desert, the stream poured down from the skies,
fresh and clean, and full of the energy that comes from storms.
This story comes from the book, “Women Strength” by Joan Chittister who began the last chapter with this fine version of the very well known Sufi teaching story.
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