Life Lessons

I look forward to going to church each week because I always leave feeling better about who I am and my place in the world. As we sing and as Pastor Cosby speaks, I am searching for my own personal message: what lesson am I supposed to get from this experience. My spirit is filled and the message prepares me for the week ahead.

Lessons, whether the result of something good or bad, are always there to teach us something about ourselves. I call them life lessons. There is a reason for every single experience that we encounter. If I drive over a nail and get a flat tire, my lesson could simply be a test of patience, especially if I’m in a hurry.

Still, there are bigger lessons and people deal with much larger issues and ask, “why me?” At times, it is so difficult to equate serious situations, serious illness, life or death incidents, with a simple, “it happened for a reason.” I’m reminded many times of what Dr. Maya Angelou says, which is to stop and say “thank you” when you are in the middle of the biggest crises of your life. Whenever you are being hit upside your head and you can’t understand why, she says to say “thank you” because you know that your faith is so strong that whatever you’re going through is only there to teach you more about yourself. On the other side of every storm is a greater sense of joy.

In the meantime, don’t allow that outside experience to define you internally. You are NOT your illness. You are NOT your current state of unemployment. You are NOT the person, the villain, the enemy that others try to characterize you as. You define who you want to be in the world. You define yourself. You were born alone and you will die alone so your life is up to you and how you make it.

I thought about this a couple of weeks ago as I found myself standing face to face with a “larger than life” experience for me. For a second, I wanted to crumble and fold up, but then I heard a voice saying, “how dare you!” It shook me at my core because the voice was right. How dare I focus on this one bad situation when God has given so much to me.

As I think about how situations fell into place for me, and how blessed I really am at this stage in my life, I felt ashamed because I was about to allow one problem to define myself and my character. And to do that would be an insult to the many blessings I have received.

And then I started to think about this even more and I began to relate problems and lessons to my overall purpose in life. When we live our lives with purpose – and we actively participate in each day, we realize we are not defined by any single issue or situation. We realize that we are put on earth for a larger reason and at the core of anything we go through in life, is our method of adapting and moving on. We learn the lesson and then we move on from it. Thank you, God, for this day.