Sometimes I find myself in awe of a person and the potential they have to be so much in so many ways, at those times I think perhaps they're hiding from themselves a little bit.
I wonder why that is, and what it would take to bring them out of hiding.
I'm foolish of course, when I try to change other people, because I didn't make them the way they are, God did. If He wanted them to be different, He would have made them so. (* disagree if you want, but wait till the end to do so.)
Instead I need to learn what it is God is showing me in them, so that I may effect change within myself. When that change has been effected, poof! No more apparent short-coming.
Every lack in the world is a mirage, more than that, a vision. A revelation of the Holy Presence, the Shechinah. The Shechinah acts like a mirror reflecting the impurities within our soul back out at us. Yes, it hurts, but it also allows us to know what we need to fix.
In that sense, the whole world is a diagnostic testing environment for our soul. That's what the Talmud means when it says the whole world was created just for you.
When we see a person, a beautiful holy soul, in hiding. We need to know it's a message, a very simple message: Stop hiding.
You're the one in hiding.
This is true of every relationship, all the more so one's relationship with one's wife. (or husband) If you find fault in even the smallest thing, find that fault in yourself and fix it -- you will see that it vanishes in your wife as well. One's wife, like the Shechinah, reflects your flaws back at you, so you may fix them -- that's the deeper meaning of Ezer K'negdo - "a helpmate opposing you."
The world will change before your eyes, but only when that change begins within you.
[This is the deeper meaning of uniting the Shechinah and HaKadosh Baruch Hu, when we affect a change, the Shechinah, which 'descended' all the way down here to represent the flaw now 'ascends,' reunited within the perfect unity (lacking nothing) which is Godliness.]
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