Will Power

“I remember quitting my job and all of sudden having no real source of income. I remember feeling as if I was facing a wall, having no visible options to save my family from financial hardship. And, I remember feeling so hopeless that I had no choice but to totally abandon myself to Hashgochah Pratit. After all, I recall thinking to myself at the time, how many times has God saved me in the past? How many times did I know in advance how He would do it? How many times did hopeless situations turn into hopeful ones, right before my very eyes? So, I rubbed my hands together with enthusiasm and said with conviction, ‘I can’t wait to see what God will do this time to help me out!’ Well, one thing led to another, and by the time the year was over more money had passed through my hands than had the previous years! It was a great year, and so was the next one …”

 

“I found our dream home quite ‘accidentally’, and once I did, I knew I had to buy it. But I only had $10,000.00 to make the deposit, and was given 30 days to come up with the balance — a mere $240,000.00 U.S.! I remember thinking to myself, Are you crazy? Where will you come up with money like that, and in 30 days yet?! But, another voice said, Trust in God. He can do anything. You’re buying this house so you can move your family to Israel and make as smooth a transition as possible for them. Your intentions are good. God can make it work. Amazingly, not only was the paperwork completed in the two days I had left before flying back to North America, but the builder even took me to his bank, and there, on the spot, arranged an $80,000.00 mortgage for me, reducing the amount I had to raise back home. Nothing in Israel ever worked that fast, or that smoothly, but it did for me then. It was dizzying the speed at which things were moving ahead for me. However, only ‘Phase One’ of this trial of trust and faith had been completed, but it was enough to give me additional confidence to succeed at getting through the rest of the ordeal. To make a long story short, by the closing date all the money was there, without the having to go to a single bank back home. Some money came as gifts, the rest as private loans. But, by the following spring we had made aliyah and had taken full possession of our new home in Eretz Yisroel. There is no way to measure what a great miracle it was …”

 

“My doctor said that I would need to have an operation, and then go for chemotherapy. He said it was already late, and we had to start right away. I came home from the hospital distraught, and my husband and I cried together. However, he refused to do anything without checking with Rav Kanievsky, so he did. He cried to the rav and told him the entire story, after which the ‘Steipler Rav’ told him, ‘Go home and live your lives normally. Don’t go for treatment. The illness is already gone.’ I was nervous at first, but as my husband told me, ‘If the Steipler says the illness is gone, then it is gone.’ At least, that is the way we dealt with it; we felt confident everything would be fine. About a year later when I was expecting, I was at the hospital for a routine check-up on the baby when I happened to see the original doctor who had diagnosed my illness, ‘Where have you been?!’ he said with grave concern. ‘You should have started treatment a year ago! You may have cost yourself your life!’ he told me. ‘I feel just fine’, I told him calmly, but he insisted upon checking how far the ‘illness’ had spread. To his utter shock, there was no trace of the illness anymore …”

 

The world is filled with a lot negativity. There is so much that one could be negative about on a daily basis, on a momentary basis. Wars, death, poverty — it’s all there. If one just focuses on all the world’s problems for even just one moment, he or she can become emotionally overwhelmed and have difficulty ever being positive again.

 

Thank God, the world is filled with much good as well, far more good than bad. And many have at least a few stories, if not many, of miracles that have happened for them at some time or another. Even if a person is going through a difficult time at present, his or her face will light up as he or she recalls a miracle from the past, as if it is occurring right now.

 

This is not yet the perfect life of the Messianic Era, and it would be premature to expect perfection. There is still a need for free-will, so therefore there is still a yetzer hara — an evil inclination. And, as long as the evil inclination exists, people will continue to make life miserable for others, and life itself will throw us curve balls that make life the challenge that it often seems to be. All of it is by Divine design, but it is challenging nevertheless.

 

Stories of miracles abound. Stories of Hashgochah Pratit, of Divine Providence are told all the time. Secular people start by saying, “You want to hear an amazing story?” or they say, “Do you want to hear about an amazing coincidence?” Religious people say the same thing, except that they insert “God” in place of “coincidence”, or in place of “the universe”, and talk about how God answered their prayers, or about how He came through for them as they dreamed He would.

   

To be continued

 

 

  

(Author, lecturer, and scholar Rabbi Pinchas Winston is the director of ThirtySix.org. His book Be Positive is available for purchase online)