Are spiritual challenges the deities deliberately making life difficult for me?

When you encounter difficulties, do not immediately assume that the deities are punishing you. Work, relationships, and family life all contain problems we need to face. People who do not practice spiritually also face challenges, and beginning practice does not mean everything will go smoothly from then on. What matters is whether, after something happens, we understand the problem, learn from it, and adjust our approach.

I compare this to training someone to take over a business. Before entrusting someone with greater responsibility, you need to give them experience and see whether they can carry it. Spiritual practice is similar. Some principles become our own experience only when we live through them ourselves; afterward, we may be better able to help others. Seeing a difficulty as a challenge is about learning how to handle things and developing ourselves through it, rather than knowing only how much we are suffering.

In the early days of running the spiritual center, there were times when I earned less than five hundred Taiwan dollars a day, while still having to pay rent, buy food, and support my wife and children. It was more than hard work. I could not see a future and did not know what to do next. Even when everyone felt there was no way forward, I continued to believe that the deities would not abandon me, and I still wanted to help others. Having made it through, I now look back on those days with deep gratitude toward the deities.

My family worried too. They wondered why I was still thinking about helping others when I could barely support us. I understand that concern. But when I saw other people's suffering, I strongly wanted to do what I could. It felt like a powerful voice within my soul. Later, I asked the Bodhisattva why my life had been so different before and afterward when I worshipped the same deities. Gradually, I came to understand those experiences as teaching me what it means to help beings, to hold a teacher's great vow, and to develop compassion, compassion that feels others' suffering as one's own, and the power of vows. This was an understanding I reached after living through it myself.

Money can therefore also be a challenge in spiritual practice. Do we help only when we have money, or do we genuinely want to help from the heart? We need to see that clearly. There are ways to help when we have money, and we can still do what we can when we do not. If life is becoming unmanageable, we need to identify what must improve. If we want to help others, we can also begin with what is possible now, rather than tying the two together and saying we must wait until we have money.

Especially when dealing with the unseen world, our determination and vows need to be firm enough. A friend once asked how much people who continually speak of helping beings could actually do when real sacrifice and commitment were required. That question has stayed with me. A vow cannot be just words. What reveals our intention is whether, when genuine difficulties arise, we remain willing to face them and keep looking for solutions.

I have also used the example of someone at a level of nine facing a test at a level of ten, to explain how spiritual challenges encourage us to make a little more effort and take another step. In my understanding of the faith, the deities are not trying to make us fail. However, if practice leaves us increasingly miserable and our situation keeps worsening, even to the point of destroying family life, we need to look for the problem. Do our ideas, methods, or the group we belong to need adjustment? We cannot continually call it a test and do nothing to improve matters.

As a student running along a mountain road, I once became so tired that I felt I could not go on. I slowed down and continued with very small steps, eventually finishing the route. During military service, I also went through highly stressful days when more senior soldiers gave me a hard time. I kept my faith and visited temples to pray when I was on leave. I felt the deities and Buddhas gave me much support and helped me through that unhappiness. These experiences led me to believe that when things are difficult, we should not abandon hope first, but keep seeking a way forward. If we truly cannot think of one, we can ask teachers, family members, or friends to help us think it through.

Dao Shun also shared how, during a low period, he had neither money nor work, and how his income and life later gradually became stable. He described the change as moving from negative one or two hundred points to positive one or two hundred. In explaining it, he spoke of feeling the deities' blessings, while also emphasizing his own need to work hard and change. This was his personal experience. Some things really are easier to understand after we have lived through them ourselves.

During the pandemic, we discussed remote work, online interaction, and changes that might occur in society. Some of those points were observations and predictions being passed on at the time, but the practical principle was straightforward: when circumstances change, we need to find ways to respond. Facing problems, learning, and making adjustments add to our abilities. The saying about meeting soldiers with generals and blocking rising water with earth also reminds us not to decide in advance that there is no way forward.

I have also spoken of testing ourselves. If we care intensely about money, it can easily lead us around; if we care intensely about a relationship, we may remain caught in gains and losses. When dealing with a situation, we therefore need to examine what we are attached to, why we cannot get past it, and whether that attachment is blocking the direction we originally wanted to follow. Understanding a challenge is not only about asking why the deities arranged it this way. We also need to return to ourselves and do the learning and changing that are ours to do.

I once posed a hypothetical question to myself: if someone offered a billion Taiwan dollars to buy Sheng Zhen Men, would I waver? This did not actually happen. I used the example to examine whether I ultimately wanted to make money or help people in the direction I had originally chosen. A challenge sometimes reveals what matters most to us, giving us an opportunity to choose again.

Challenges in relationships must not be interpreted simply as a requirement to keep enduring. If, after showing understanding, the relationship and both people's feelings gradually improve, that understanding may be part of the lesson. But if we have made that effort and nothing improves while we become increasingly uneasy, we need to look again at the reasons. We must not first decide that this is a test from the deities and then require ourselves to remain in the same suffering indefinitely.

What I came to care about more was what a so-called test actually taught us. Dao Xuan shared that in the past, urgent matters at work often arose around pilgrimage trips. Rather than simply abandoning the work, Dao Xuan calmly sought solutions, asked the company or colleagues for assistance, and made good on those obligations and favors afterward. For Dao Xuan, learning to organize things and no longer losing composure at the first sign of trouble was the change that experience brought.

However, calling something a test does not justify insisting on a path that keeps getting worse. I have also reminded people that if things remain bad despite continuing, they should identify which part is wrong and adjust it if necessary, even stopping the original approach. Faith offers support so that we can face life more wisely. It is not a reason to leave every form of suffering unaddressed.