Episode 172 - Divine Providence: Belief Shapes Reality

The biggest relationship shift in my life was realizing this:

Not everyone is your problem - sometimes they’re your message.

Save this for the next time someone pushes your buttons.

When I stopped asking, “Why me?” and started asking, “What am I supposed to learn?” everything changed.

That mindset saved my marriage, my peace, and the way I handle people.

You can’t control everyone around you.  You can only work on yourself, trust the process, and let the lesson do its job.

Maybe the challenge is mercy in disguise.

What’s harder for you - blaming others or looking inward?

Link in bio for the full conversation.

#emunah #personalgrowth #FaithOverFear

Transcript

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If you believe he's a physician, he's a physician. If you believe he's the provider, he's the provider. If you believe he's the matchmaker, he's the matchmaker. That's how it works. But it says if the person thinks that things depend on him, the individual, then the creator withdraws his divine providence. Suddenly he's not the doctor, suddenly he's not the matchmaker. Suddenly he's not all of these things. Why? Because you decide that he wasn't these things. It starts and stops with you. The trust factor is the ticket to a better life. The trust factor shows you how to get through the night. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Trust Factor Podcast. It's Friday. Thank God it's Shabbat T-G-I-S. Get ready to unplug, guys. I know you've been doing it, and if you haven't, it's time to start. The clock is ticking. We're not guaranteed another minute. You've got a Shabbat that's coming upon us right now. Enter into that Shabbat by leaving your baggage behind. Close off yourself and your family to the rest of the world. You do not exist as far as the secular world is concerned. They don't have access to you. You want to get in touch with me? Saturday night. That's the soonest possible time for you to get back in touch with me. And reality is that if you're doing it right, Saturday night will come. And the last thing that you will want to do, the last thing, not the first thing, is turn on your phone. If you're still rushing to pick up your phone first thing, as soon as Shabbat exits, then you know something is not right. Something is amiss. You're not keeping Shabbat the way that you need to keep it and for the right reasons. If you are keeping it for the right reasons and you're enjoying it thoroughly, then as soon as Shabbat comes, the last thing you want to do is start to hear the dings and the noises and get pulled in all these different directions from the myriad of people who are trying to get your attention again because you've become available to them. You just exited a world of peace. You just came out of a world that was quiet and that was purposeful and that was beautiful, and you had food and you had friends and community, and you had family and you had songs and you had laughter and you had learning and you had spiritual growth and so many amazing things. You forgot completely about all the craziness that's going on around you. And then suddenly the clock strikes the hour and you can't wait for the craziness to come back. There's something wrong. You've got to constantly be working on yourself. You need to flip it so that you're sad, you're, you're, you're miserable that you have to turn on your phone again. You want Shabbat to continue. It should be like this every single day. When you get there, then you know that you've attained the right mindset again. You've broken the spell that society has put on us. And they do a really, really good job of it, but you can get out of it. You can get out of it by enjoying your Shabbat. Shabbat is the key to the rest of the week. Let's get back into this concept of social life. How do we inject faith and trust into our personal relationships, our interpersonal relationships, our friends and our community members, our coworkers, our bosses, all the people that we interact with. We said yesterday that it's either proactive or reactive. You're either a victim or you're managing those relationships. How do you manage those relationships? Because you know that every one of those individuals and the interactions that they have with you, especially if they're ones that challenge you, come from your creator. He signed off on it. Okay, Joe is now allowed to go and embarrass Jesse in public, God forbid. So Joe has that right and he is now being used as a tool. Joe has a problem. He's got a bill to pay. That bill is going to be a big bill. So God says, All right, you're already heading for trouble. You've already got it coming to you. So now I'm going to utilize you to do the dirty work because you're already going to get punished. And that's really a form of mercy for Joe. Think about it, right? If God had punished Joe and then sent him again later on, then he'd be due for more punishment. So God says, if I'm already going to punish Joe, then I might as well get him to do some more dirty work so that he pays that bill at the same time. You understand? So it's really a mercy. Everything that he does is a mercy. It says over here, very, very interesting. Pay attention, because this is what we deal with on a daily basis, that when a person encounters a challenge with a friend, with somebody within their social circles, they have two choices, similar to what we said yesterday. They either look inwards to say, I'm the problem, not Joe. Joe didn't do anything to me. Joe was sent to me by my father to send me a message. I've got the message. There's something wrong with me. I need to investigate. I need to find out where I'm failing, and I need to work on myself. Guys, is there a downside to that? That's your creator who has a 30,000-foot view of every single move. He sees what's behind you, he sees what's ahead of you, he sees what's around the corner, he sees it all. What do we see? We can't even see beyond our own noses. He sees everything, past, present, and future. And so in his love, he's guiding you by sending you people to put you on the right path, to do some introspection. Thank you. Those are the words that should be coming out of your mouth, not why me. It's thank you. I got the message. This too shall pass. You've heard of that of that before, right? I believe it was King Solomon that said, this too shall pass. That applies in every single situation. Oftentimes we just applied that statement to the negative. You know, when somebody's suffering, when somebody's in mourning, when somebody's having financial difficulties or health difficulties, what do we say? Don't worry. It's also going to pass. It's temporary. You'll see, you'll get through this, you'll come out the other side. This too shall pass. I have news for you. It also applies when things are good. You have to know that it's always the case. Why? Because this is a temporary life. All of life will pass. So the bad and the good will pass. When you're riding on a high, when you're on top of that wave, recognize that it's temporary. And eventually it's going to settle down and you're going to end up being and flowing. That is life. So you have to recognize that God is sending you a message to say, right now, you need to do some introspection, get off of that wave and come down to earth and figure out how to improve yourself. So you either blame yourself, which is the right thing to do, forget about Joe, or you do the exact opposite. And you blame Joe. It says over here, the person with that I'm going up blames his troubles on others. He looks at what other people need to correct as if he himself has already attained perfection. There's nothing wrong with me. What do you mean? I get it right all the time, or at least nine and a half times out of ten, I'm on the ball. Everybody else can't get their stuff together. Everybody else is the cause of all of the problems in my life. If only people were smarter, if only people were better, if only people would just follow my lead, this world would be a better place. I know a person whose life has never been good. It has been a series of challenges, soul correction challenges that you and I should never dream of. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong in their life, and it's always at their own hands. This person lives alone. They've always lived alone. They cannot have relationships with other people. And yet, after almost 50 years of living like this and getting worse day by day, if you ask this individual who the problem is, they will tell you with the utmost confidence that everybody else is the problem. That the reason that they are suffering is because the world is falling apart around them, because people don't know how to behave. And that if only people behaved more like them, then the world would be a utopia. I've heard those words myself with my own ears out of their mouths. Your life's falling apart. You can't put anything together. You don't have two nickels to rub together. You can't make your month end. You have no social life. You can't be around people. You don't know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. Everything is corrupted in your view. And yet you're insisting that everybody else is the problem. It's exactly what the book is saying. Stop worrying about everybody else. Why? He says, Because your sorrow is going to be doubled. Why doubled? Because you can't rectify the other person. You can't fix the system. You can't fix everybody that you think is behaving badly. What can you do? You can only rectify yourself. So if you're so worried about rectifying everybody else, you'll continue to suffer. Since he doesn't do what he should, he continues to think that he's suffering because of other people. It's a double minding. Let me give you an example, a personal example. We'll let you in on some personal information. When I became a Balchuva, when I became an observant Jew, I was very young. I was in my early 30s, and my wife and I had just started building our family. We had our first son, and we were starting to grow in our observance. Now, I had the merit of starting us off. I was the one that was inspired by my rabbi. I was the one that had the awakening, not my wife. We both grew up in secular homes. My wife grew up in a home that was actually in some stages of her life quite negative towards religion. And so for her, it was exceedingly challenging. We didn't sign up for this. She certainly didn't sign up for it. And here we are starting to learn Torah on a daily basis, starting to go to synagogue to pray three times a day, to rapt fill it, to start keeping Shabbat, to start going to these events with communities that we've never interacted with before. I remember the first time we went to a Shabbat dinner at the rabbi's house. Now you have to understand, the rabbi that I'm referring to was the type of rabbi that was the most unoffensive in the world. This is a rabbi who, before he became a rabbi, was debating going into stand-up comedy. That was that was plan B. Actually, it was plan A. He ended up with plan B, which was becoming a rabbi. The most relaxed individual you could ever meet. Hilarious, great sense of humor, beautiful family. But my wife was terrified. Why? Because we were going to a rabbi's house, okay? Just the term rabbi. What do I have in common with a guy called Rabbi? That's where we were, not that long ago. Now, why do I tell you this? Because I was growing in my observance, but very much aware of where my wife was holding. And I did what I explained to you guys many times. I conferred with the experts. I asked many people to say, listen, I'm growing, but my wife is not. I would love to change my wife. I would love for her to come along this journey because I see truth. I now have my eyes opened. I often likened it to having a mask, a blindfold removed from you. That's exactly what it is. You walk around this world for however long God determines that you should be a secular individual, that you shouldn't know of his existence. You're walking around blindfolded. You think you know what's going on, you haven't got a clue until he decides now you merit it. Now I'm going to remove the blindfold from you. And thank God we got to that point in our lives, at least I did, where God removed the blindfold. He hadn't removed it from Michelle's yet. So now we're moving forward. But I'm speaking to the pros, which is what I tell you guys to do. Don't go it alone. There's no reason to go it alone. You're going into uncharted territories. You've never been there before. You know nothing about it. There are pros who've dedicated lives to this. They've seen it a million times. They've they've advised many, many families in the exact same scenario. They know what works and what doesn't work in every situation. So confer with the rabbis, and that's what I did. And they all said the same thing. Do not put excess pressure on her. Do not. It will not help. It'll do the exact opposite. She will go the other way. The only thing that you can do, they said, is be the example. Lead by example. Be the change that you want to see. And so that's exactly what I did. I didn't put any pressure. I didn't recognize her as being the problem. It was me. I changed. She didn't change. I was the one that was changing. I was growing, so it was a good thing in my mind, but not in hers. So I was the one changing. I'm the problem. So why should I inflict pain and hurt on her if I'm the problem? So what I did was I withdrew and I continued to just do what I was doing, but make no demands of her. Whatever she wanted to do was perfectly fine by me and acceptable 100%, exactly as though it was before I started to keep all of these commandments. And even as I was keeping the commandments, I was cognizant of the fact that she wasn't. And so I didn't do it in an overt way that made her feel like she was losing out. But do you know what happened as a result of my choices as I was guided by these rabbis? My wife saw a husband that became a better husband. She saw a father becoming a better version of the father. She saw a community member. She saw a community. We didn't have a community before. We had us. It was just our family in these walls. And suddenly we had friends. And suddenly our children have friends, their age, and suddenly we have a place to go to on Shabbat to be able to have conversation, friends' houses. We got invitations to people's houses to go for Friday night dinners or Saturday lunches. Everything was changing. And we were benefiting from it. Our children were benefiting from it. I was benefiting, and Michelle was benefiting from it. Long story short, my friends, by recognizing who the problem was, it wasn't her. It was me. I changed. I was growing. By recognizing that and trying to speak to the pros and make the right choices in that situation. Today, I could tell you that my wife is leaps and bounds ahead of me. She's doing the things that I need to be doing. She's constantly reminding me of the mistakes or the direction that we need to be in because we're human. We're going to ebb and flow. We're going to ride a wave of life. I don't care who you are and I don't care what your title is. You're on that same roller coaster of life where we go up and down. The key is that you have more ups than downs. The downs are perfectly acceptable. They just should be far and few between. Most of your roller coaster ride should be ups. That's it. We accept the downs with love because they're what allow us to acknowledge the fact that we're down. If we didn't have the downs, we wouldn't appreciate the ups. That's how life works. That is what the book is talking about. So it says the creator directs a person in accordance with the person's level of imuna. Just listen, guys. If the person believes that the creator is a physician, a provider, a matchmaker, and the source of all of the abundance in the world, then the creator oversees that person with complete individual divine providence, meaning to say that if you believe he's a physician, he's a physician. If you believe he's the provider, he's the provider. If you believe he's the matchmaker, he's the matchmaker. That's how it works. But it says if the person thinks that things depend on him, the individual, then the creator withdraws his divine providence. Suddenly he's not the doctor, suddenly he's not the matchmaker, suddenly he's not all of these things. Why? Because you decided that he wasn't these things. It starts and stops with you. That is to say, the creator leads a person on the path that the person chooses. How many times have I told you this sentence in Hebrew? Badir Shahadam Wotzalelef Bomolichimoto in the direction that a person wants to go, God has an obligation to take him. In other words, if you want me to be the doctor, I'll be your doctor. Is there a better doctor on planet Earth? Is there a better doctor in the universe, in the galaxies? The answer is no. Who's the best doctor one could possibly ask for? He who gives the sickness can also give you the cure, right? That's the idea that if you want him to be your doctor, he will be your doctor and he will be the best. Who's the matchmaker? You think you're gonna choose, or your mother's gonna choose, or your father's gonna choose, or the guy in the shoulder is gonna choose who you should be married to? And that they're gonna know? Obviously not. The one who knows is the one who makes that match in heaven. He knows what that soul has to rectify. He knows what your soul needs to rectify, he knows where your paths have crossed in the past and what you're going to do to help each other in the future. He brings you two together. Who do you want as a matchmaker? There's only one, my friends. It's the same thing with everything else, but it starts and stops with us. We determine we want him to run the world or we want us to run the world. Who do we want to answer to? Him or a government, him or a boss, him or some random person on the street that doesn't care about us and only cares about themselves. The answer is clear and it's obvious. Don't overthink it. He's there. You can reach out to him and say, God, I want to have that relationship. I want you to be my doctor. And I'll finish with this. I know an individual who was diagnosed with a very, very serious illness. And I know family members of theirs. And their family members would come to me in private and they would cry to me to say, I don't understand why they're not running around the world trying to get treatment. I don't understand. They've got plenty of money. They can be on every private jet flying from country to country to try and find the best possible doctors to treat this individual. And it was, they were beside themselves because they didn't feel that they were close enough to have that conversation or that it was appropriate. So they would complain to me as if I could do something about it. But what I explained to them was very simple. They're not doing it, not because they can't. They have more money than they could ever use in their lives. They have more resources than most people have. So for them to pull in favors and to get on flights and to fly across the world and to go from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist, all of these different trial treatments, they could do that, but they didn't. They chose not to. They chose to choose the best doctor available to them in their area and to continue life as usual and to make the number one doctor for them God, their creator. And thank God they did because their lives were not affected by it. They continued a sense of normalcy, and today they're doing exceptionally, exceptionally well. It's not in our hands. If you want God to be your doctor, my friends, just ask him. And he'll be your doctor. He'll be anything you want him to be. But it all starts and stops with you. Have an amazing Shabbat, my friends. We chat again on Sunday. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts. Drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.