There is no shortage of bad luck in my life right now. This is not meant to be a complaint, it is simply meant to state that right now, we are experiencing an unusually high number of challenging moments. The list of events is too long to enumerate here. Suffice it to say that just about "anything that can go wrong, is going wrong.
Piling On
Here is just a sample of what I am talking about. Yesterday, while I was working in Los Angeles, I got a flat tire. While fixing the tire, my son Jacob called to tell me that his car had overheated and that he was stuck on the side of the road. He was on his way to pick up our daughter Sarah, who had got sick at school and had waited in the medical office for two hours while the school tried to get a hold of us.
Jacob was worried about calling me because he had mistakenly backed into a friends car on Friday night and caused about $500.00 worth of damage with what he describes as a nudge. I laughed as I listened to his voice mail – "Dad, this is Jacob. There is something wrong with the car, and I did not run into anything."
When I finally got a hold of him, he asked a very interesting question. He said, "Dad, we are busy with some good things right now, why are we facing so many challenges too?"
Grin and Bear It
I was grateful for this teaching moment. I explained to Jacob that bad things happen to everybody, and that bad things never happen in a convenient moment. I then went a little deeper. I told him that our trials serve as defining moments. The way we respond to them defines the level of happiness we enjoy in our life.
You and I have at least two choices when we are faced with trials. We can hang our heads and ask, "why is this happening to me?" or, we can lift our heads, smile and say, "I can't wait to figure out the answer to this problem?"
Jacob wondered aloud, "our finances our tight right now as we prepare for Christina's wedding. I know we don't have any money to fix cars, how will we do it?" I was thankful to be able to say, "I don't know how we will do it, but I know we will. A way will open up. It always does."
Walking in Faith
The confidence I displayed as I spoke to Jacob was not contrived, nor was it discovered yesterday. It was built in the face of many different challenges. It was fostered by moving forward in the midst of uncertain circumstances.
When we walk in faith, it appears to those who are watching that we are not afraid or worried about anything. That is a misperception. The fact is that fear and worry both reside inside a confident individual, we just don't allow them to be the dominating emotions. We acknowledge that they are there and that they won't help us move forward and so we leave them alone.
Murphy's Law, applies to everyone of us. Bad things happen. Nobody is free from that reality. The difference maker is simply the choices we make when we are confronted by our trials. We can choose to move forward, or we can choose to cry, "whoa is me".
What do you normally choose?
How do you motivate yourself to move forward?
Last night, Stacy and I sat and reflected on the events of the day. I played the various voice mail messages detailing the report of each challenge, and we laughed at the severity of the situations. We knew those messages spelled trouble – but we were somehow able to feel thankful that we would be able to survive them. Together, we took inventory of all of the things for which we feel gratitude. Amazingly, even our trials made that list. Sure, we would love to live life without them, but we realized that that, would be no life at all.
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