Part 2 in a series by Peter Watson Jenkins. Click here to read Part 1.

We all face personal times of crisis in our lives. Last time we took a look at the relationship between our human ego and our eternal soul as the twin drivers of our “bus.” This time we examine actual crises faced by incarnate souls. All the illustrations are taken from my book of soul interviews Talking with Twentieth-Century Women, channeled by Toni Ann Winninger.

Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, was a greatly revered personality of the late twentieth century. As a nun working in Calcutta, India, she contracted tuberculosis from which she recovered spontaneously. She told me that she had “turmoil within myself and energies were being held back instead of flushing out.” The turnaround in her disease was unusual and took place at the soul level. She received a message from the Masters that the time had come for her to begin her “true missionary work.” This message had so powerful an effect that “I also felt the energy go through my body, re-aligning the various chakras (the energy centers) in my body to a point which allowed the body to free itself of blockages. So in that respect it was extremely healing.”

Teresa’s doubts, which lasted for 50 years, centered on her mis-reading of spiritual reality.

If the elimination of TB as a threat to her future work was a crisis solved by her soul’s cooperation with the God-force, Teresa was less than successful in her biggest spiritual battle — an inner turmoil of doubt about the presence and the love of God. She wondered “why I was doing what I was doing — if it were something fanciful in my mind or something the Lord wanted me to do.” She told me that she did not have a ready connection to “the God-outside-of-me.” This external God she defined as “a man in a white robe…who was a father figure taking care of everyone. I expected to be openly comforted by him, since I was there to dedicate my life to him.” But the quid pro quo just didn’t work, and she spent years in spiritual agony, clinging on to the belief system of the Roman church in a God whose presence in her life she could not discover. “I prayed for a sign…but none came.”

Teresa’s doubts, which lasted for 50 years, centered on her mis-reading of spiritual reality. Yet she did in fact know the source of her inner strength: “Throughout all my work I could feel an energy when I was helping others.” This was clearly the creative energy of Source within her eternal soul. So near and yet so far! I asked her if her soul had chosen spiritual doubt as a life lesson. Her answer was very frank: “[I chose] doubt, abandonment, a call to go within—which, in human form, I never answered.”

Barbara Jordan, another subject in Talking with Twentieth-Century Women, was successful as a black female politician, the first to represent Texas in the US Congress. In former lives she had been both Plato and Francis Bacon, and this showed in her wisdom and powerful oratory. But Barbara had a secret life as a lesbian. The potential for crisis was enormous because there was no doubt that admitting to homosexuality would herald the end of her public career. The management of this crisis was successful. Barbara and her partner, Nancy Earl, kept their sexual relationship a secret for 20 years until Barbara’s transition.

Some human crises are pre-planned and allow no opportunity for reaction.

Some human crises are pre-planned and allow no opportunity for reaction. Before incarnating, actress Sharon Tate had contracted to be killed, and she and her unborn child were brutally stabbed to death by members of Charles Manson’s cult. She had been “totally enjoying life” and had no conscious idea what would happen. Back in the spiritual Home she recalled the contracts she had made. So thoroughly was the event prepared for by the universe that no soul had ever been assigned to her unborn child.