For some time now I’ve been struggling with the idea of “just how much should we help a person in difficulties”? What is the Spiritual answer to “how should I be my brother’s keeper”?
I do know that a major natural law is: “any entitity is either growing or decaying ( going backward)”. I do know that the AA community says basically that you cannot change an addicts behavior, they have to do it themselves. We can help if they ask for it and are willing to accept responsibility for their own life changes. However, we can not do it for them.
In a Spiritual light we are told that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within” and ” as a man thinketh in his heart so is he” which shows us that Spiritually we are all capable of leading a happy. prosperous, and meaningful life if we learn to access the “Kingdom within” and master our thoughts of victimhood and bitterness at the system.
Just like learning to ride a bicycle, life requires some mistakes and failures as we learn what works and what doesn’t to get us to the goals we seek. So it appears that failure and frustration are part of the Divine process of learning what works and what doesn’t work in our approach to life. When we were learning to ride the bicycle we would have stayed in the belief that we couldn’t learn to ride it if we didn’t continue on through the rough spots and break through to “I know how to do this”. When we take failure and upset out of life lessons, it appears that we stymie the person’s ability to grow and learn how to produce their own happiness and prosperity.
Maybe “being my brother’s keeper” includes allowing them to fail and then encoraging them to try again until they succeed which is a lessson they will apply for the rest of their life. Are we making people and organizations weak by not allowing failure in our world?