You have been trying to second-guess the world, have you not? In your mind, you have taken a puzzle piece and tried to fit it, whether it fits or not.

Beloveds, you might as well take the color blue and say it should not be blue. You might say it should be a different shade, a different tone, a different combination, a different configuration, that it should be something else than what it is. But blue has its own integrity and does not listen to you.

In the same way, when the tide of the ocean rises very high, you say the tide should not rise like that. You say it should rise only so high and not higher. You say it should never cover the beach. You say it has no right.

When the wind blows in great proportions, you say the wind should not blow like that either. You would set limits on the wind. You would stop it at a certain speed and not let it go higher. You are sure what behavior of the wind is allowable and what is not allowable. Anything over a certain strength disturbs you.

But oceans do rise, and strong winds do blow. That is all you really know. It is you who gives circumstances a grade. You may name it catastrophe. You name it catastrophe because it was not what you wanted. It did not fit in with your view of things. As much as you would like to understand, you do not see value in what you see as excesses of nature, and you would not give permission for a storm to be what it is.

When the sun comes up on the desert and burns the sand, no one calls it a catastrophe. Its heat is extreme, yet it has been accepted that the sun burns hot above a desert. It burns brightly. It dries everything exceedingly.

In the lands of snow, the same sun would be a welcome blessing.

This, beloveds, is the relative world. It has a mind of its own.

Hurricanes are not irate, beloveds. You are the one who is irate. Hurricanes are simply what hurricanes are. Yes, I understand, no one wants to be in one, and no one wants anyone to go through a hurricane. No one wants to be at the mercy of the elements. My children would prefer an orderly regulated life under the umbrella of nature. Yet nature has its own course to follow. It really is not a horse that you can harness. You cannot make it behave the way you think it ought to, the way you wish. The way you wish is based on a near-sighted view. Will you accept that there is much in the Universe that you have not yet begun to understand?

How can it be on the same Earth that there are mountains and there are valleys? How can it be there are marshes and deserts, there is wet, and there is dry? How can it be hot in one place and cold in another? How can it be that there are saints who walk the Earth and the unsaintly who also walk the Earth? How can it be that people speak different languages? How can it be that people see the same things differently? How can it be that the same custom in one country is honored, and in another it is not? How can anything be as it already is? All this is hard to grasp.

And, yet, how can anything be what it already is not?