The Most Useful Bit of Advice-Daily Meditation 9.12.22
Today’s quotation:
If I were asked to give what I consider the most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say, “I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.”-Ann Landers
Today’s Meditation:
I think Ann’s advice is great, but I believe I would take it even a bit further: I would say that when trouble comes, don’t even see it as something that’s trying to defeat you. Trouble isn’t in our lives in order to try to make us miserable or to ruin our lives. Trouble is an inevitable part of life that helps us to grow and develop our strengths as we deal with it.
A trouble-free existence would be incredibly boring if you think about it. We’d have no need to use our problem-solving skills, and much of our intellect would lie unused somewhere deep inside us. Without trouble, we’d never learn how to overcome obstacles, and some of the most important inventions ever created never would have come to be without difficulties to face.
While many troubles aren’t the best thing for us, it’s important that we keep in mind just how good they can be for us. We needn’t embrace troubles as we would old friends, but we can look more closely at it to try to figure out just what lessons it has in store for us. When we see our troubles as challenges that can help us to grow, they become opportunities, and that subtle shift in perspective can help us to deal effectively with virtually anything that happens to us in life.
Troubles will come. Some of them will be more drastic than others. But troubles are bound to become worse if we see them as something that’s here to hurt us or to test us; they can be valuable friends if we can but learn to see the value that they’re bringing to our lives.
Questions to consider:
Why do troubles make so many of us lose our peace of mind?
What good things can troubles bring to us?
How can we learn to shift our perspective on the troubles in our lives?
For further thought:
Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.-Henry Ward Beecher
