I can help here. I deal with supermarkets everyday, including PakNSave. It varies by store, but ultimately they’re all looking for efficiency. Kiwi kids these days are generally (not all) unreliable and unmotivated, often not turning up, calling in “sick” at short notice, or worse, working for a couple of weeks and checking out. Migrant workers work hard and they’re reliable.
From an employer perspective, that’s gold and adds to the bottom line.
We might not like to hear this, but it’s true.
The thing I have understood most differently since the illness is the nature of God’s presence in suffering.
Before, I understood it theologically.
God does not cause suffering but can work through it. The Christian tradition has a God who enters suffering rather than eliminating it. The cross is not the elimination of the worst that can happen but the transformation of it.
„If you willingly carry the cross, it will carry you. It will take you to where suffering comes to an end... If you carry it unwillingly, you create a burden for yourself and increase the load, though still you have to bear it."
These were propositions I held. True propositions. Propositions that had not yet been inhabited.
The inhabiting is different.
Some may believe that the cross of Christ may be burdensome, but what I have learned is that Jesus helps us carry it.
What I have found inside the illness is not the absence of God in the difficulty or the presence of God as comfort that makes the difficulty feel less difficult. It is something more precise and more strange. A presence that is most available in the exact moments of the most complete stripping. The moments when the ego has given up managing the situation for long enough that the situation is simply what it is. The body is what it is. The limitation is what it is. The uncertainty is what it is.
In those moments, which are not peaceful exactly but are very clear, something is present that is not generated by me. That does not require my management to continue. That is simply there, in the specific quality of its there-ness, available to the part of me that is small enough and quiet enough and stripped enough to receive it.
God is in the pain. Not above it dispensing comfort from a safe distance. In it. In the specific texture of the stripped moment. In the encounter with finitude that the ego’s prior invulnerability assumptions were preventing. In the breaking open that as the precondition for the soul’s genuine movement rather than its managed performance of movement.
The mystics knew this. Julian of Norwich, writing after her own serious illness in the 14th century, described what she called the love that was never absent even in the moments that felt most forsaken.
Thomas a Kempis, said it directly.
„What does it profit a man to discourse learnedly of the Trinity, if he lack humility?“
The knowing that does not pass through the self’s smallness is not the knowing that transforms.
The illness provided the smallness. Not as gift exactly. As the reality that the prior self could not have chosen and that has become, in ways I could not have predicted, the ground of something more honest than what the prior self was standing on.
Thank you everyone for seeing our stories and sharing in many corners of our beautiful planet. it means the world to me.
May God Bless you.🙏🤍
Gave me goosebumps.
Truly powerful and a must watch.
If there’s an AI awards this should definitely be submitted.
It’s by @ifarca - he doesn’t put much of his work on X. So please give him a follow on his Instagram page @ im_ai_gination
“He calls his death his glory, esteems his crown of thorns more precious than Solomon’s diadem; looks upon his welts as spangles, his blows on the face as ingots, his wounds as gems, his spittings on as sweet ointment, his cross as his throne.” - Trapp on John 13:31,32:
“So, when [Judas] had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in Him…”
@EliAfriatISR Because of God’s everlasting covenant with Israel. God’s Messiah will one day rule over the whole earth FROM Jerusalem. Satan hates the idea and has put that hatred in the hearts of millions of people since the establishment of the Jewish people in their covenanted land.
This is one of the best illustrations of what socialism (in any form) does to the poor. It promises a ladder of programs & benefits but can’t lift people out of poverty. No country on earth has made the poor better off under socialist governments.
@iqrafatma1278 I always thought 10% was good. It seems it’s 15% if the service was OK and 20% if the service was excellent. Does make sense. I love dining out and it is true that if you can afford a bill of $500.00+ you can afford a decent tip!