One of the consequences of having something is that someone, somewhere always wants it for themselves. Whether that be money and positions of authority, or more personal things like friends and family, no matter who you are, you must deal with the enviousness of those who covet both your belongings and your personal relationships with the people in your life.
In the case of physical things, the remedy is simple, though somewhat difficult to accomplish: relinquishing your wealth and power. It will alleviate a great deal of the negativity that grips those who are themselves greedy for such things, leaving you in relative peace.
Unfortunately though, even if you are willingly a pauper, there will still be those who envy you. They do so out of their own ravenous desires, which will never be slated. Such people may point to the few things you own as justification for their hatred, but that is ultimately a lie, because what they truly want is not to have what you have, but to BE who you are. And that is not something that is within your power to bestow upon them, nor in their power to acquire, but only in the hands of heavenly forces to bless us with.
In the absence of such abilities, your enemies will seek the next best thing: to destroy you, so as not to be constantly reminded of the person they can never be. Some will try to do so overtly, while others will try more underhanded and stealthy strategies to secretly undermine you. Either way, their ultimate goal is your demise.
So what is the solution? How can one survive those who hate you because of who you are? In my younger years, I would have suggested crawling into a hole and hiding your entire life. But a particularly inconvenient bit of holy scripture has changed my mind over the years. It compares those who hide their beauty from others to one who takes a lamp that they have lit in a dark room, and then hides it in a cupboard, instead of placing it on the table where it belongs.
Ultimately, those who hate another person's beauty are like indolent beings of the night, who rather than scurry away into the darkness beyond the newly radiating fire's reach, foolishly approach it in the hopes of extinguishing it. And they only get burned for their misguided efforts, or worse yet, consumed by the flames.
Regardless of their fate though, can anyone blame the fire itself -- the source of life-sustaining heat and comforting light -- for being there? Hopefully few in their right mind would. For without it, there would be but an endless and frightening darkness in every direction, filled with terrifying predators of the night.
Likewise spiritually, the lights in this world are here to shine, and must be allowed to do so. Trying to extinguish or hide them is both futile and counterproductive, not to mention exceedingly dangerous.
I realize what this means: that those who are hell-bent on the destruction of their fellow men and women may in fact succeed in killing their self-declared adversaries. Many a righteous person has been felled over the millennia, through no fault of their own. But death itself is inevitable, so the question becomes: would you rather die in daylight, or die in darkness? That is the ultimate choice before you, me, and everyone else who treads this Earth and breaths this air.
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