Adversity & Resilience

“As for the future, your task is not to forsee it but to enable it.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Today I lost my job. There may not ever be a great time to lose a job that accounts for the majority of your monthly income, but this was a particularly low time to be told my services were no longer needed.

When I graduated two years ago, degree in hand, I kicked my feet up and waited for the job offers to come pouring in. Needless to say, they trickled — never poured — and the financial abundance I was waiting for never actually showed up.

Pain and loss is a reality that we all have to deal with in our lives from time to time. It can control our lives and bring us down, or it can actually cause us to change in good ways and make us better.

It’s easy for us to want to push aside our negative feelings and not acknowledge their existence. We want to feel good and be happy all of the time.

And there’s nothing wrong with wanting happiness.

But what if when pain, heartache, or loss strike us, they can actually change us to make us better people? And what if it can help us deal better with future occurrences of pain?

The rapid fire pace of daily life takes its toll and often fails to give us even a moment to pause, recover from, or even consider what’s going on around us. Our world is more frenetic, more overwhelming and more opportunity- laden than at any time before in human experience. Modern life has become a hail storm of input, activity, connectivity, and a never ending flow of information. Pressured situations come at us from all sides – at work, in social settings, or at home.

If we’re to make the most of the whirlwind existence sweeping around us, then it’s a good bet that we’ll need some shelter from the storm from time to time. We can’t stay inside forever — literally or figuratively— not unless we want to give up participating in the world and the company of our fellow human beings. So, how do we find a moment of shelter from the storm?

I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s when parents still told their kids to go outside and play. My friends and I would spend all day in the yard and when we got hot and sweaty enough we’d run to the back patio, open the water spigot on the side of the house and get down on our hands and knees so we could get low enough to turn our mouths up for a drink of water that splashed all over our faces and down our necks. In the evenings I remember seeing my parents shaking their heads as they watched the oil crises in the 1970’s unfold on the nightly news. Gas prices skyrocketed to 73 cents a gallon! “Turn it off,” my mother would say to my dad. “Good grief! The wheel’s are coming off but they make it sound like the world’s ending.”

Like me, as a child you probably hoped for a life that would exceed your dreams but as those dreams collapsed along the way you’ve simply wished for a soft wing of hope but instead have gotten life in a culture of ungrace. That’s not a word but it should be. If you don’t know what ungrace is just listen to most people who didn’t vote for any sitting president, watch how fast Hollywood turns on a star who no longer sells at the box office or turn on the news anytime during the day. Ungrace pulsates in our workplaces, communities, and in the media and tells us that regardless of what has happened we must do better, look better, and make ourselves better. But to love and accept someone regardless of their flaws and failures is a breath of hope in a world that turns more upside down than right side up. That is the gift of grace. It’s being dirty and smelly and turning your face up under the spigot. Sometimes the wheels need to come off and you need to get pretty low before you appreciate grace.