What really matters in life.

My friend is telling me about terrible troubles in her life. I know her for years. It’s hard to understand why God would do this to her. She’s had a hard life: sexual harassment at work during a time when women were mostly secretaries or held other subordinate roles, if any. She went through a divorce, and raised her kids alone. Isn’t it enough? I ask myself.

But we do not understand God’s ways, and every time I have seen her, it’s been another unusual and awful calamity.

Finally last week she told me she had gotten depressed about it. “I feel like I am cursed,” she said.

So I said to her, cautiously, not wanting to impose, “maybe you want to think about visiting Israel, going to the holy city of Safed, and praying at the gra—“

The last word is “graves,” as in “graves of the holy rabbis.”

But the sentence couldn’t come out fully because she interrupted me.

“You know I am not religious.”

I’m not saying that everyone has to believe a certain way, or believe in God at all. Just that our minds are very powerful machines. If we tell ourselves a thing, usually we will believe that thing against all available evidence.

I know in my heart that God is calling out to my friend to return to Him in some way. But what I know is not important.

We ended the call with the thing that really matters.

“Thank you for taking the time. Nobody will be at my funeral. It’s nice to know that at least somebody cared while I was alive.”

By Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal (Dossy). All opinions are the author’s own. Public domain.