Need your advice, what would you do?

If you have a choice between feeling guilty or resentful, feel guilty instead. Resentment eats away at you while you can forgive yourself of guilt.

When I was living in Germany (Stuttgart area) I was once approached by a woman who was a refugee from the eastern european crisis (around 2000). I simply don’t remember what nationality she was in that mix–nor do I care.

I was riding on the train home to the town I was living in with my now ex wife (who is still a great friend I’m happy to say), from teaching English in Stuggart. I noticed that a woman was taking interest in me, an interest I at first took to be that kind of interest vanity would always like it to be. But then I began to pick up on a deep, existential intensity to her manner of regarding me, something beyond the bourgois everyday world most everyone else including me was floating in.

I got out off the train. She followed and came up beside me. She offered to give me a tarot reading, offered in a way that was very serious emotionally. The kind of energy I got from her was like that from an intelligent friend in need. She was fairly young, maybe early twenties, attractive.

I thanked her but no, I didn’t want a tarot reading. She kept following me; I had not rejected her as a person, just her tarot reading; I knew something heavy was going down with her. I noticed another detail: her German was very polished, grammatically correct, well pronounced. Here was someone who in her native situation had gotten a good education, who’d probably come from a relatively ‘well-placed’ family.

She opened up. She was a refugee who indeed had had a good situation originally, but now she had used up her resources, didn’t know if her husband or parents were alive or dead and couldn’t get any leads on them, and her landlord was going to kick her and her kids out in a few weeks if she didn’t come up with the rent. She had approached other men, men who looked like they had money, who had alluded that if certain favours were granted, they would give her lots of money… She had refused. She was resisting the spiral into prostitution. She was trusting me with her true situation, which was mortally serious, terrifying for her and her kids.

I walked to the bank machine of my local bank as we walked and talked. I could only really rationally afford about two thirds of her rent–otherwise I would no longer have been able to pull my weight in my household for that month. She asked once for more, but I refused. She would have to find others, or use the money to change her circumstances in another way apart from placating a slum landlord. She accepted that, and was grateful for what was given. My feeling is that that was enough, and she was already helped by a human gesture. You have to pick and choose in a world that has few easy answers–if another such individual had come along ten minutes later, I would have had to say no, etc. I wish I’d been then in a position to offer her some work (she was obviously competent–but had no work visa), but wasn’t.

When I was a kid part of how my single mom mother made a living for us was as a lifeguard. I asked her to tell me about that one time. One of the things she said was part of the training, was that when a person is desperate, drowning, you need to take care that you don’t let them take you down with them in the intensity of their panic–that would apply to even someone you love dearly–because that doesn’t serve either of you. Help out without sacrificing your own balance. Actually, that is a lesson I still find hard–certainly I have partially learned it the hard way, and have the heart-wounds to show for it. (But shall we live never getting our hands dirty?)

Still, the above doesn’t necessarily provide an answer to your situation, which has a different character to it, but I thought I’d share it as it is along the same lines of weighing the needs of ‘me’ versus ‘you’, where we’re all swimming in the same pond, and if one goes down, drowning in dark, poisonous despair, the whole pond is leeched of some light.

Simon

Wow that was so deep, you are truly an enlightened being, I was totally out of line in calling you a joke. Did anyone note the sarcasm? Inner smile, and healing sounds are where you need to begin.

Very mature!! Healing sounds is what you need.

Benny Hinn is calling you back to his sheeple, oops I meen people.