​Coach Kim: How is this WAR our perfect classroom?

,Many people tell me they struggle with faith and doubt God (or a higher power) when they see senseless death, tyranny, murder, and cruelty happen in the world. Maybe you have asked yourself questions like these, as you have watched the invasion of Ukraine happen:

• Why is God not answering the prayers of these people and stopping this?
• Is Putin’s value really the same as ours?
• Is this war, the people of Ukraine’s perfect classroom?
• Why would this happen to them and not me?
• What can we learn from evil dictators that kill people?
• How is this our perfect classroom?

 
Many of us are feeling pain, confusion, and fear, as the idea of a World War III becomes a possibility. We ask ourselves, “Could this actually happen”?  If nuclear weapons are used, our planet and way of life could be destroyed. We are sickened by the thought and wish there was something we could do. All of these, are terrifying thoughts.
 
I’d like to share a couple ideas today that may help you fight the fear and find some sense of purpose or some solid ground right now. Here are some ideas to consider:
 
You only have two choices, trust or doubt, and you must choose one:

When horrific things happen, it is natural to doubt that the world is in God’s hands. It is normal to wonder if God is in charge, why He allows such things to happen? It’s normal to feel alone and unprotected, when you watch bad things happen to other people.  But at the end of the day you have two mindset choices, you can trust or you can doubt, and what you choose matters.

Here are the options:

1) You can choose to trust God that nothing exists He did not create, for the purpose of our education. You can trust that if he allows bad things to happen there is meaning and purpose in them. You can choose to trust that though things look scary, He always has us safe in his hands and promises a perfect classroom journey for each soul.  You can choose to see in tragedy we pull together and there is also an increase in love. You should never want tragedy to happen, and you should see it as horrible when it does, but you can still trust God to use this for our benefit in the end.

If you choose this mindset you will feel like you are standing on some solid ground and from this place, you will have more access to your love. You will have more to give others and you will feel stronger, wiser, and safer.

If you don’t consciously choose this mindset, you will subconsciously choose doubt.

2) Doubt says there is no purpose or meaning in what happens, that we live in a chaos state where we are not safe.  If this is true you must worry about protecting yourself all the time, from threats. Doubt makes you believe that bad things just happen randomly and they have the power to take from our quality of life and make you lose the life you could have had. 

If you choose this mindset (consciously or unconsciously) you will feel like there is no solid ground under you, and you will primarily be focused on protecting and promoting yourself. You will have less to give others, and you will feel vulnerable, deprived, and unsafe in the world. When you feel this way you can’t trust anyone and you have very little to give. You are too busy worrying about your safety.
 
Understand, there is no proof that either mindset is the true. So, whatever you choose, it will be a belief. You might even try both beliefs on and decide which mindset gives you a better quality of life and better relationships.  In the end, you and you alone will determine how safe you feel in the world, what you trust, and what meaning you apply to your experiences. No one can make this choice for you.
 
In over 20+ years as a personal coach, I have watched many people process trauma, loss, and grief. I have seen them choose both options, and I can tell you, the overwhelming majority have created a better quality of life by choosing trust than doubt.  But this is good time for you to think about what you will choose.
 
If you choose to see life as a perfect classroom and trust God that everything is here to teach us and grow us, here are some lessons we could be learning from war:
 
We love and value people we didn’t know we loved before:
Every time we watch tragedy hit a group of people in our world, our hearts go out to them and we discover that we love them. These are strangers we have never met nor loved before, but watching their pain, loss, courage, and strength, draws them into our awareness as brothers and sisters. We have a desire to help, stand up for them, and express our love and support in donations or in any way possible.

Think about any past disaster and you will see there is always an equal increase in love that follows it. These situations destroy and then they create love. These experiences connect us and remind us we are one with all our brothers, and that’s a beautiful and important thing to realize. I just wish we could hold onto it longer or find it without a tragedy happening.  It would be worth our time to consider ways to keep a hold of these feelings from now on.
 
We clarify our values, when we see them disregarded:
There is nothing like having our deeply held values of freedom, democracy, empathy, kindness, and caring get trampled, to remind us how important they are. Suddenly we feel our values more deeply than we did last week. We are clear about what is right and wrong to us. We feel passion for what we believe and we seek for ways to live those values in a bigger way. Again, I wish it didn’t take tragedy to bring these to our values to our awareness, but we should take this chance to lock them in, and stand for them in a stronger way. You could use this experience to reaffirm your commitment to living your values and become a better person for them.
 
We are more connected than we think:
The pandemic taught us this lesson, that what happens to our brothers, far away from us, impacts us all. We are so connected it only takes weeks for a strain of Covid, in a village in China, to reach every corner of our world. When any of our brothers (even on another continent) are suffering, it is a world problem and one that we must all face together.
 
The invasion of Ukraine is about all of us. It’s a blow to our common values and it must be solved by us all coming together. I get a warm feeling when I watch other countries like Germany and Sweden step us to help Ukraine. I suddenly see them as my brothers too, and I love them for their commitment to peace in our world. It serves me to appreciate and honor their loving actions. These events make the world feel smaller and more connected in a good way. Viruses spread quickly, but so does love.
 
We all have the same worth, though we have different classrooms:
All the time, when I teach the principle of ‘all humans having the same value’, I get asked, “What about Hitler?” Everyone wants to know how I can see an evil dictator, who murdered millions of people, as having the same infinite value as the rest of us. 

This is the thing, every problem on the planet can be traced back to belief ‘that some groups of people have more value than other groups of people’. This one idea has caused more human suffering than any other. It is what caused Hitler to do what he did.

Albert Einstein (one of the smartest humans that ever lived) said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” So, we cannot solve the problem of human suffering by believing any human has less or more value than any other. We must adopt another belief, an opposite one. The idea that all humans have the same intrinsic worth, no matter what they do, is an interesting alternative.

This doesn’t mean that a person’s choices don’t have consequences. You are co-creating with God, your perfect classroom with every choice you make and Hitler made some horrific choices with some horrific consequences. I believe he signed himself up for some pretty hard lessons, which he is probably still learning from. But, we must still see all humans as the same in value, or we create a slippery slope of exclusion. We go from excluding Hitler, to that neighbor we don’t like, to our mother-in-law who is truly difficult, and you soon right back where you started. 
Seeing all human souls as having the same infinite, unchanging value just creates a lot more love, compassion, empathy, and understanding, than it’s opposite.
 
There is no source of ultimate truth about the value of human beings though. So again, this means whatever you decide to believe and however you decide to determine the value of human beings, it is belief not fact.

I promise though, if you try both beliefs on, you will find that choosing to see all humans as the same produces much more happiness, confidence, and love in your life, than judgment ever could.
 
Attacking other people is never justified:
This is a really interesting lesson that is coming from this experience that we could all benefit from. We are disgusted, right now, about the unfair, unjustified, attack of Ukraine. We are horrified that this innocent group of people, should be needlessly attacked, but the truth is, we all attack people all the time.

Not to murder or physically hurt them, but to protect ourselves from mistreatment, defend ourselves from perceived slights, and stand up against what we see as wrong behavior.

Just the other day I had a woman yell and swear at me (attack me) saying I wasn’t handling something correctly. It was uncalled for, inappropriate, and rude. I immediately told the people I was with, about this woman and her behavior (attacking her character). As I look back on that experience I can see we both felt justified to mistreat each other and we all do this to people all the time. If they do something we see as offensive, we feel perfectly justified in attacking them.
 
How often does this behavior show up in you?
 
This is a wonderful opportunity for us all to grow. If you are disgusted by Russia’s (and more accurately Putin’s) behavior, start by making sure you don’t justify attack in your world.

Make sure you see honor, respect, and love others, while maintaining healthy, respectful, boundaries. Respect is the only worthy response, towards any soul perfectly created by God. People will do things that bother you and hurt you, but you can always respond with humanity, empathy, and respect for whatever they are experiencing. It’s not easy, but it’s the behavior you would be most proud of later.
 
I am sure as this experience unfolds, there will be many more lessons on love that we can glean from it. The trick is to use every experience to make you better. There is not much most of us can do to assist our brothers being attacked on the other side of the world, but we can do this.
 
You can do this.