So Far I’ve Survived 100% of my Worst Days

Last month, as the days were dreary with grayness and dampened by continual rain, my sister fell ill with the flu. I gave her a little stone with the word STRENGTH etched onto it. She said just seeing it helped her hold on through the long painful days and sleepless nights of coughing coughing coughing and finally through sheer determination and in answer to many prayers, she is well again and this week…she gave the stone back.  She knew that this week I’m the one that needs strength.

Margaret Thatcher once said that “You may have to fight the battle more than once to win it” and I’m thinking that’s the case as I clasp the stone in my hand and ask the Lord “What woulds’t Thou have me learn from this experience?”

I turn to my ancestors, reading story after story and examining photo after photo, I fly through the decades and further back into the centuries as their names, some so very foreign, roll off my tongue and I get to know their strengths. Strengths that I realize were often grown out of trials. Triumphs out of tragedies. Beautiful blessings rising from the ashes of great loss.

Between the dates of their births and the dates of the deaths, these people lived. They made their lives matter. Some were great soldiers who fought in great wars, some were farmers who fed the hungry with the fruit of their labors, some were religious men and women who saved souls and gave succor, some simply pushed forward one step in front of the other and inspired others to do the same. So many women that raised children in love and taught them values and integrity even in the most trying times. So many of them lost their husbands and continued on, courageously learning to be strong on their own. I see that they were always growing, always having challenges and overcoming them. I recognize that these experiences won’t cease, because that is life.

I read once that sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but actually you’ve been planted! So I ask again, “Lord, what woulds’t Thou have me learn from this experience?”

I search and find a statement by Orson F. Whitney that gives me strength as I read it … “No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God.”

And Larry Richman stated: “Trials give us opportunities to show the Lord and ourselves that we will be faithful. We can choose to feel sorry for ourselves and ask, “Why me?” or we can grow from our trials, increase our faith in the Lord, and ask, “How can I be faithful in the midst of this trial?” We can let adversity break us down and make us bitter, or we can let it refine us and make us stronger. We can allow adversity to lead us to drift away from the things that matter most, or we can use it as a stepping-stone to grow closer to things of eternal worth.”

I somehow feel that my ancestors knew that.  Knew it and even embraced it and created lives filled with successful triumphs and courageous, intelligent solutions.

Can I?

Well, actually, as the saying goes, I guess that so far I have made it through 100% of my worst days. So give me strength here I go and with a good deal of hope...here I grow…again.