Hope And Adversity

A lot of good can come out of adversity. When we are feeling the pain of adversity, it makes us think nothing good can happen for us and we lose hope. However, when we are standing in the Light, there is a way to make good things happen. Willfully making good things happen when we are going through adversity is called growth.

A man came back from a weekend retreat experience and when a friend asked him how it was, he said, "I died!" The friend asked him what he meant. "You see," the man answered, "I went to this thing not knowing what to expect. But in the process of that long weekend, I discovered I had spent my whole life hiding behind a lot of masks. I realized I had never even let my wife see me as I really was. I'd been playing games with her, and playing games with my children, and playing games with others -- never letting anybody know who I really am. The worst of it was to discover even I didn't know myself. I was not in touch with my own honest feelings about myself. And, as all of this was being exposed over the weekend, I died over and over again." It is a painful thing for a middle-aged man to discover he is not even in touch with his own feelings about himself. "I am convinced," he said, "that I had to go through this death experience in order to become the new person I hope to be now." Out of every hopeless experience can come new hope and new life if we are determined to make it so. The key point is we must want to make good things happen when we are suffering. Our will, exercised in the direction of God, produces good results. The results produced are not always immediate, but they are life-changing and long-lasting.