You went through what you had to go through so that you would have the strength to stand at the post you’ve been assigned to. The greater the adversity, the greater the call is on your life. You were pushed down so you’d be able to lift up.
Without that adversity, you wouldn’t know how to handle the responsibility of all that was waiting behind it. Our strength is built through endurance. If there were nothing to endure, we would never gain strength.
When you lift weights, the muscle fibers break down so that they can grow stronger and larger than they were. When we’re ripped apart and broken down, it’s meant for us to grow. We can allow our experience to breathe life into someone, ourselves included. Or we can allow our experience to be the thing that stopped us from pursuing anything resembling greatness. We can allow our experience to rip the breath right from our lives.
It’s pretty easy to get into that broken down mentality when your life is in fact broken down. It’s easy to believe that this is how things will ALWAYS be. It’s easy to think that you never get a break. Easy leads straight to death. Straight to Hell.
“If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. If you do what is hard, your life will be easy.” – Les Brown
Doing what’s hard means accepting the fact that you just got dirt thrown in your face. The “hard” thing is actually pretty simple. Just accepting things and saying, “Alright… this is terrible…. this is terrible.” Breathing that thought in and letting it be. It’s ok to admit that things aren’t going great right now. It’s ok to admit things have actually turned to shit right now. It’s ok to admit you’re not at your best right now.
There is not a single human that has ever walked the planet throughout their lifespan in a constant state of all things being at their best right now. Every single person who has ever lived through this human experience has looked around at certain points (plural! more than one) and said, “Wow… this sucks.” Whether you’re a believer or not, christians know that even Jesus, the one human that never sinned, wept and sweat blood in a garden the night before he was crucified.
So, if Jesus had bad days, you and I are not immune to them.
Simply accepting things as they are at any given moment of trouble does far more good for you than resisting. Dan Millman wrote, “Stress happens when the mind resists what is.” Woooo….. that’s big. You might want to sit on that thought for a second. When we fight against the fact that things are as they are, we make it that much worse on ourselves.
The victories in our lives are first won in our minds.
You need to work on your definition of victory by the way. Like I said, doing the hard thing is actually pretty simple. Victory is not ONLY defined as financial freedom, a Grammy award, graduating college… Victory is also defined as waking up to go to class. Victory is accepting the things happening in your life at any given time and simply reminding yourself that they are as they are. If I can start to believe that because of this sandstorm, I’m growing better, I’m growing stronger, I’m growing… and right now I have to wrap this scarf around my face to endure the winds… then I’ve achieved a massive victory.
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