Reaping and sowing, karma, or why you were ever born ( Part I)

Ever wonder why you were born? Ever wonder why you faced consequences that seemed to be the result of some other person's and certainly not of your own doing? 

Have you known people who seemed to be offered many choices and provided  many advantages and opportunities in life while others seemed destined to walk a specific narrow path with few opportunities to escape? It's not easy to believe in miracles when time after time you keep falling on your face, but I might have understood had someone explained the law of cause and effect.

  I grew up mostly in the church, Baptist and Methodist, and I loved everything about my religious upbringing, but after my father and mother divorced, my belief system changed. When I was ten years old, I stopped believing in God because He seemed to be sexist, racist, and had a bad sense of humor.  Otherwise, why would he allow my beautiful mother to be burdened with single-parenting ten children after thirteen years of marriage to a hard-working, often absent, infidel? What Father in Heaven would force my mother into welfare while the pretty little housewives living across the street did nothing but read best-sellers, heat left-overs, and frequent the shopping malls? Worst yet, why would He allow one of my sisters to be born brain-damaged by doctors-in-training during the birthing process?

 

I had prayed for answers to such questions but gave up when they didn't come. I felt doomed to repeat this same horrid past if I continued to believe in a cynical god who seemed to be laughing at us, all the way down from heaven, coaxing us all to give up, one by one and fall through the cracks into Hell. I never imagined the possibility of having a choice and never suspected I might have had a say in when, where, and under what circumstances I would be reborn in this lifetime, all based on karma, or the law of cause and effect.

I have always felt I was a child of the universe, but I never knew the universe consists of ebb and flow, a never ending cycle of causes and effects. I never knew to expect the bitter and the sweet just as casually as I expected sunshine and rain, high tide and low tide. Instead of thinking I was caught up in some kind of tragedy that I did not create, that my mother didn't create, and that the entire world was witnessing, I began to wonder if there were other options. 

 

When people stared at the eleven of us sitting in the church pews or half of us boarding a city bus,  I thought they saw our family as broken and weak, our mother as damaged goods, and the ten of us as disadvantaged tribesmen. But that was never true. How could it be true when we were so beautiful? How could it be true when our intentions were usually good?