Joan’s fortunes changed after the king’s coronation. Was her mission life essentially fulfilled at that point? During her assault on Paris, she rallied her troops promising them they would be inside the Paris walls that evening. A crossbow bolt ripped through her leg. She did not stop insisting that the city would be won as she was dragged from the ditch and carried to safety. What she didn’t know was the king had made treaties with his enemies to temporarily end hostilities for the winter, taking matters into his own hands and against Joan’s wishes and proclamations. Castor wrote, “The great theologian Gerson had foreseen this very problem. The ‘party having justice on its side,’ he had concluded after the triumph at Orleans, must take care not to render the help of heaven useless through disbelief or ingratitude, ‘for God changes His sentence as a result of a change in merit,’ he wrote, ‘even if he does not change His counsel.'” What is Creator’s perspective?

This points to great wisdom perceiving how even heavenly support and intentions and planning can be for naught if the people who must implement a strategy or opportunity fail to hold up their end of things and, in making poor choices, foreclose the possibility of victory even when divine support might mean a better outcome, all other things being equal. And this is truly because the divine will work through you, and if it is an indirect intervention, such as adjusting weather to put a damper on things, there must still be a human request to make that happen, and almost always the execution of a divine strategy will depend on many acts by many individual humans having within their hearts a divinely aligned awareness that their participation is needed, and they will rise to the occasion to do their part, in contributing to what is highest and best as an outcome, but this, of course, is not guaranteed. People will sometimes lose their resolve, surrender to fear or become corrupted and have their sights lowered, or give in to temptation if they are bribed in some way to change sides, or perhaps ease up their contribution to things, and then the opposition will have a freer hand, and thus the more deserving side might fail in spite of the good intentions and the blessings of the divine. We rely on humans, always, to do their best because this is a test of them, not of us. We have the power to make anything happen we choose, but that is not the point of your existence, to be a bystander to our whims to put things in motion, make them change, and bring about outcomes to our liking. This is about you; it is all about you and your fellow beings. You are in a contest between good and evil, and the problem with Joan of Arc, in her time of trial, was that she ultimately was acting more and more on her own as her support began to erode, and this left her more vulnerable. There are limits in what is possible, and this is true for everyone no matter their initial strength and wherewithal to win the day even under difficult circumstances. Everyone has a breaking point and areas of vulnerability that might weaken them, and that can become a downward spiral.