Psalm 92:6
“How great are Your works, O Eternal; how exceedingly profound Your thoughts.”

Being an offspring of the Boomer Generation, I was blessed with being raised around some great people, who taught me moral work ethics.

Recently, I have been battling with a situation on my job where there are some who seem to care little about having moral work ethics.

The other day while working, I finally decide to pray about the situation. To be honest, my prayer was more of an angry judgmental prayer about a particular coworker’s poor work ethics. Anger toward this person and the situation has been growing stronger every day.

My prayer to the Creator consisted of asking Him to do something about the situation that has been going on for almost a year now. Something had to change!

The night of the day I had prayed, was the first class of a six week lesson on Torah meditation that I had signed up take. When I woke the next morning, the answer to my prayer came flooding into my thoughts and it was not the answer I was expecting.

My prayer about the situation and the person was like playing catch with the Creator, He caught it and threw it right back at me.

The answer to my prayer was in that very class, it is as if the answer to my prayer had been prepared before I had prayed.

Some of the points brought out in the class were:

• Quieting your mind to overcome negative emotions.
• The mind rules the heart.
• Justification is the mind becoming a slave to the heart i.e. emotions.
• You are in control of your mind – insert a positive focus to produce positive emotions.

Around 5 am in the morning I woke and could not go back to sleep, as I laid there, I began pondering the points mentioned above.

I had to admit that I had allowed my emotions to take control over my mind. My mind had become a prisoner to the emotional feeling I was having about the situation and toward this particular person. By allowing this to happen, my emotions blocked the Torah knowledge that I had spent years learning. It was as if the Torah principles that I had working hard to mold my life by was locked up in some kind of jail cell by my emotions.

The Creator threw my prayer back at me and when I caught it, it was clear that He was showing me that I needed to concentrate on myself first. I had to work on unlocking the emotional cell that my mind was being held captive in. Then the passage of Psalms 92:6 became my prayer of acceptance in what the Creator was telling me.

What I wanted to share in this blog is the fact that we all from time to time get caught up in the environment around us. We are so busy that we do not take the time to really think things trough and when this happens, the majority of the time we react through our emotions rather than through our intellect.

A teaching from one of the great Jewish Torah teachers sums all this up:

“ Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (the Besht,'' founder of the chassidic movement) taught:Your fellow is your mirror. If your own face is clean, the image you perceive will also be flawless. But should you look upon your fellow man and see a blemish, it is your own imperfection that you are encountering—you are being shown what it is that you must correct within yourself.” chabad.org

“How great are Your works, O Eternal; how exceedingly profound Your thoughts.”

Psalms 92:6

Terry W. Hayes
2/16/22

Photo Credit: Grant Durr on Unsplash