In our first blog post we talked about love and fear as the two base emotions in the human condition. We discussed how the foundational laws of the universe can help us stop operating from a state of fear and shift towards operating from a state of love. In that post, we began with the universal truth that we are eternal and infinite. However, other truths and laws could just as easily and effectively be used as our starting point. One of these is the law of divine order.

Everything is as it should be.

Simply stated, the law of divine order keeps everything operating just as it should be, as part of a grand, complex, and perfect process. In the big picture, nothing is truly ever “wrong.”

Seriously?

If your reaction is “Seriously?” I promise you I understand. If I had a nickel for every time throughout my life that I looked up and said, “Seriously?” I’d have a lot of nickels.

I didn’t have a very good week. It’s mid-April in Connecticut and it’s still overcast, windy, and so cold. Summer is my blessed favorite season and it can’t arrive soon enough. Everyone I know in New England has had it with the grey sky, the wind, and the cold—it’s impacting everyone’s mood. On top of that, nothing this week seemed to be going according to plan—at least, according to my plan—but still, the truth is that things are just as they should be.

Yup—seriously.

I had to remind myself of many things this past week, including the universal law of divine order. Ultimately, all things considered, I moved through the week like a champ. It was all small stuff that was making me not feel joyful, but small stuff has always been the stuff that I struggle with. I’ve generally (with a couple of exceptions) done very well moving through the bigger things in life.

This time, I did an amazing job navigating a challenging week, but there have been plenty of difficult weeks, or even just moments in my life, that I didn’t navigate like a champ. Twenty years ago, I might have kicked a hole in a wall during a week like this. Oh wait—twenty years ago I did kick a hole in a wall once when things weren’t going the way my mind wanted them to. As a teenager, I might have slammed our front door and peeled out of our driveway (in reverse) at MACH 1 when I wasn’t pleased with someone (oh wait—I did do that, too as a teenager), or… well, I have a fairly long list of examples, but I think those two get the job done.

In those days, I knew the law of divine order, but I wasn’t very consistent in letting it guide my behavior. I’ve grown a lot, though, and I feel much better now that I’m good at living in peace with this law. It’s been a very long time since I’ve kicked a hole in a wall (twenty-years in fact) or slammed a door, or peeled out of a driveway. It wasn’t easy to get here, and the path wasn’t linear. It took dedication and a deep desire to transcend fear—fear that things weren’t just as they should be. Fear that things weren’t working for my highest good. Like everything, it’s an ongoing journey, but it’s worth it. Once we are something (compassion, generosity, peace, love, etc.), it’s our nature to want to be “it” more. Faith in the law of divine order was such an important part of my growth.

More about the law of divine order.

Circumstances and conditions often won’t look “just as they should be” to our minds, but again, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t. In fact, it’s generally when we think things don’t look or feel good that life is giving us our greatest opportunities for growth. It’s a perfect chance to demonstrate who we really are—eternal and infinite, as a start, but also so many additional things that we’ll talk about in future posts, along with how to look through the lens of the soul when things that don’t feel “just as they should be” to our minds.

The law of divine order governs all that is across the cosmos. It’s all supremely intricate and interwoven—connected in all ways (the universal law of oneness). There is chaos all around us in life, now more than ever in my lifetime, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t order in the universe. Each thing, condition or circumstance in life is a thread in a very grand and elaborate process. A process with great purpose that we’ll talk about soon, after we’ve built our solid foundation to understand why there is nothing to fear. I’ve explained the process as I understand it in detail in my novel Beyond the Light of the Willow Tree, but we’ll talk about it here, too.

If for the sake of this conversation we can all agree that everything is in divine order, it would then stand to reason that nothing happens outside of our Creator’s will. This should be so comforting, and a strong source of inner peace. If we believe in a loving God, which many of us do, the law of divine order would also mean that only that which is for one’s highest good can occur. Therefore, nothing can happen that isn’t for the highest good of all.

All of this can be tricky to wrap one’s mind around—after all, contemplating the grand purpose to life is no small undertaking! But it’s well within our grasp when we begin with the foundation.

One does not have to look any further than the natural world that surrounds us to see the law of divine order in practice. Even though we’ve polluted it, intruded on it, and abused it, flowers still bloom, trees still bear fruit, animals still have babies, the moon and the sun are still in perfect rhythm, and the beat goes on. Perfectly.

This law applies to the people in my life, too?!

The genius sage Wayne Dyer wrote a great blog post titled Trust Divine Order, which focuses on the perfection of the “intelligent system” that places all the right people in our lives at just the right times. Conversely, each one of us shows up for just the right people at just the right time in their lives. As a universal law that governs all that is, it’s a universal law all of the time.

The benefits of trusting the law of divine order.

This past week, each time I started to feel frustration, disappointment or any other uncomfortable feeling, I paused and reminded myself that everything is in divine order and everything in my experience is for my highest good. This soothes my logical mind. If these two things are true, even my mind has a hard time saying “yeah, but…” It didn’t necessarily mean I liked the conditions and circumstances of this past week (I didn’t), but I was able to honor them. And bless them. And be genuinely thankful for them, because I knew they were propelling me forward with the capacity to be an even grander version of myself than I was prior to this past week.

Children living in poverty, tyranny, and a polluted mother earth as examples are all in divine order? Seriously?

Yes. But it’s our journey and responsibility to transcend and eliminate those conditions and countless other conditions. Many things can be true at once—that’s how intricate, grand, and purposeful our Creator’s plan is. And we are going to transcend and eliminate poverty, tyranny, pollution, and countless other things, too—I’m unequivocally sure of this.

Is the law of divine order new to you? Or perhaps you’ve been demonstrating this law your entire life, instead of kicking holes in walls or peeling out in your car (I don’t mean the fun burning rubber that many of us did as teenagers, ha!).

The light in me sees and honors the light in you,

—DC