Are We Spiritually Tested?

Have you ever felt that you were being spiritually tested?  Many people, at one time or another, have felt they were being tested spiritually by some divine power - or God.  For many, just like blaming one’s karma for making a thing happen, so too, being spiritually tested seems to offer some rational explanation as to why an occurrence may be taking place in a person’s life.

Usually, being spiritually tested is associated with a time of particular difficulty in a person’s life.  At other times, being spiritually tested may revolve around more pleasurable experiences, such as sexual temptation, eating weight-producing tempting desserts, and/or other indulgences. Even if you omitted divine intent for testing, at the very least, an experience could be understood to be a self-test.   

A self-test could be to determine just how much you have grown spiritually – consciously or unconsciously self-administered.  So, whether God is testing you or you are testing yourself, the fact remains that in your mind you have identified it as a test of some sort.  After all, what you believe about an occurrence in your life is all that really matters.  Furthermore, if you believe you are being spiritually tested, the important thing is not whether it be God, Angels of Light, forces of darkness, or self that is doing the testing, but how you handle the test that matters.  The strange twist to testing is that the closer you are to God, however you define God, the better able you are to handle things.

Testing is indeed of great importance for it allows you to evaluate yourself and can be more to inform you of your standing on the spiritual ladder of enlightenment and spiritual self-mastery.

I believe that testing can be God’s way of providing you with an experience to stimulate you to self-examination. A positive response by you to such self- examination may prove to be the stimulus needed to propel you into a new cycle of positive growth.  When viewed in this fashion, every testing period, even when very difficult, can be a Godsend in disguise.

Look back over your own life when you have gone through difficult periods where you questioned whether you were being tested.  Looking back, can you see how such troubling periods may have caused you to grow?  Can you see that in years thereafter you were far better able to cope with and handle subsequent difficult cycles?  Also, how you were able to make better use of positive cycles when they occurred as a result of what you had learned during testing cycles?

Just for fun, Google "Paul Harvey, The Testing Time". He was one of my favorite commentators and this is from the early 60's. When I was continually on the road with my band, my mother would clip his columns from the paper and send them to me whereever I was. One of my great joys was when I got to see and hear him in person.

Here is an affirmation that might work for you:  “I meet the test of letting go of my past that I may move on to my present and future

t the la     © Dick Caldwell 2012