Living Life on Life’s Terms
We have to! I’ll tell you why I think this:
I have never been a champion of handling disappointment well. I just hated it when things weren’t going the way that I thought that they should. It hurt my feelings a bunch and scared the hell out of me. Oh my God, what happens if I don’t get what I want, and things don’t turn out the way that they must? I acted as if I would fall over and die. It was that bad and I did it for an embarrassingly long time.
But after a protracted period of dying to self, I find that I get disappointed less often. The less concerned I am about myself, the less concerned I am about what happens. If I’ve learned one thing in my crazy journey, it is that I wouldn’t know what a real miracle looked like if it was staring me in the face. Well, that used to be true and thank God that it isn’t true today.
I have come to believe that God simply has something else planned for us. I can’t believe that He has a good and unique plan for me, but then get concerned when anything happens outside my “grand design.” I will be the last person to know what a good and unique plan for me would consist of. If I simply just accept what happens and don’t get all twitter-pated about it, I end up just fine.
It is clearly time that we quit judging how good a job God is doing with our life using our own measuring stick. If we say we believe in Him, we believe in what is happening. If we don’t believe in what is happening, we don’t believe in Him. Ouch, but a good ouch.
Today, I choose to believe disappointments are the gateway to unforeseeable blessings. If that is true, there really is nothing to be upset about. Don’t you just hate how much time we waste refusing to believe that this is true?
Thank you
Jim
James A. Francetich is a freelance writer and author. The opinions expressed are solely of the author and do not represent any community based recovery programs, private or public entities or any governmental agencies.