Positive and negative things both exist in this life. Sorrow and joy cooccur in equal proportions of intensity, but they do not co-occur in frequency. Sorrow and joy have a rhythm.
All positives are equally balanced by negatives, and vice-versa. By default, you will experience sorrow far more often than joy. Good things in life tend to be instantaneous flashes surrounded by long periods of toil and drawn out negatives. Even if positive things make up for it in total intensity, their infrequency can make life difficult, especially for those who subject themselves to all things the Lord sees fit to inflict upon them.
A more correct and detailed understanding of how your awareness is not time-limited can make life much more enjoyable. This understanding could be described as the integration of your experience.
To integrate your experience is to combine all your experiences, past, present, and future, and see your life as a composite whole.
As you approach an awareness of all things, you also come closer to constantly feeling as if every bad thing possible in this world is happening to you all at once. You see, you are not decreasing your awareness of the bad. On the contrary, you are actually increasing it from the normal state (sometimes really bad things happen) to a more accurate state (really, really bad things happen all the time). What changes is that you actually develop the tools you need to overcome the unpleasant things in your life. Normal people rely on fading memory, distraction, and ignorance to get around the bad things in life. These are inadequate to deal with the true depth and breadth of the bad things in life. When you experience maximal joy and maximal sorrow, all at once, all the time, you need a stronger set of tools.
As daunting as increasing your awareness of the bad may seem, the benefit that comes from the commensurate increase in awareness of the good is more than worth the cost. In spite of the pain this entails, it is not a relatively costly thing, because so much of the pain is not due to temporal separation but rather a lack of awareness. Most of the negative things are already present, you just aren’t aware of them. An awareness of them doesn’t change their ability to hurt you, only your perception of them, and there are tools for dealing with perception. Being able to saturate stretches of your life with the joy that comes from moments of good provides a much stronger positive outcome than the cost of increased awareness of bad.
When you integrate all things, you hack the typical arrangement where good things tend to be islands surrounded by seas of negatives. Instead, you dwell in a state of happiness that isn’t significantly altered even by the periodic occurrence of negatives. In a sense, you minimize the cost of the negatives by realizing they are temporary and you maximize the benefit of the positives by keeping them before you always.
The most beneficial thing about integrating the good things is that you can vastly multiply the net positives in life by genuinely savoring them long before and long after they actually occur.
The positive aspects of this gift are that you are able to rejoice in the present over all pleasant things in your life, even if they lie in the past or in the future. You can exercise godly patience in all things, because the passage of time no longer has power to diminish the value of your future blessings. You become resilient to shocks, because you are aware of what is to come and have substantial lead time to prepare your heart for even the hardest experiences.
Lead time comes from God revealing painful future events to you. We read the promise that “...the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.” (Amos 3:7) God desires to reveal everything he knows to all his children. Why is this promise only to prophets? It isn’t.
Prophets are not magical people to whom God reveals things, but rather people who seek and receive what he has to teach. In other words, a prophet is a description—one who receives what God gives—rather than a title—one to whom God gives things. See the difference?
What determines whether he will tell you future things before they happen is your degree of trust in him. Remember that he doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit you. He will only tell you the future if it will help you and others to do so. If your lack of trust in him would result in greater sorrow for you by knowing the future before it happens than it would to surprise you, he will just let it happen without telling you.
Does it seem far fetched that you could have greater pain by knowing the future than by not knowing? Suppose God told you that in ten years’ time, your spouse would die. Can you imagine how, if your trust in God was limited, this would cause much more pain than if you just didn’t know? Now, can you see how if you had great trust in God, this would help you treasure each day and give you more joy than if you hadn’t known?
Preparing for potential reality goes beyond knowing for certain what will happen, and includes everything that could happen. To the extent that you have faith in God, the line between what is and what is possible will blur. You will be able to act in the moment as if all positive things were already yours, as if every challenge were already conquered, as if you couldn’t fail, and as if every person were as perfect as God.
As a practical example of this gift, let us consider how we perceive and experience the death of loved ones. Death is ever-present. Every living thing is born with the eventuality of death. In spite of this eventuality, whenever we experience the death of a loved one, the typical response is one of painful surprise and shock. Why is this the case? First, it is important to realize that the source of our surprise is dishonesty. Everyone knows that everyone will die. Because normal people lack the tools to contend with this fact, they willfully ignore it. How we handle death is not so much about an event but about being confronted with an obvious piece of reality that we are normally really good at ignoring. Grief is not a coping experience, but the passive passage of sufficient time for us to once again regain our ability to ignore this aspect of reality. How do you prove it? Consider how many people, distraught by the loss of a loved one, are equally distraught by the death of their next loved one.
Should death be capable of robbing you of feeling the uninterrupted love of God? Paul thought not:
38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8)
A person who has all things before them continually does not see death as normal people do. They integrate the death of every living thing into the life of every living thing. When a person dies, they are not hit all at once with the reaction to their absence. Rather, they carry it every day of their lives. Like a mortgage, the pain is thereby amortized into smaller, manageable pieces that are constantly present. By the time the event occurs, it is much easier to contend with.
Importantly, this perspective carries with it not only reduced intensities of pain, but far greater joy. One who has integrated death into life not only experiences death as a much less intense event, but also rejoices in every single interaction with the person during their life. One for whom the absence of something is ever-present will rejoice in its presence as if it had returned from the dead. Every interaction becomes a singularly joyful and valuable experience.
Though this detailed example described how integrating all things works with death, it is equally applicable to the presence and loss of all things.