There’s a lot going on in the world that’s out of our control isn’t there? Take COVID-19 for instance. Who would have thought that we would still be hearing words like “quarantine,” “masks,” “pandemic” and “social distancing”? And, to top it all off, it’s almost a certain guarantee that we will be hearing them for a long time to come! Ugh!
Trying to control the uncontrollable is sort of like herding cats and will drive you crazy.
I don’t know about you, but here’s what I’ve decided about my current situation: I don’t want to live like I hate my life while living in circumstances that I do. I don’t want to live just waiting for the crisis to be over. I want to live a life that makes me smile in the midst of the storm. I want to be proactive and have hope while I cope!
Finding the Good Within the Bad
There are no guarantees in life except how we choose to interpret and react to what’s going on around us. Instead of complaining that the rose bush has thorns let’s choose to be happy that the thorn bush has roses. To do this we need to find the good within the bad.
Four Ways to Hope While You Cope
In order to hope while we cope we can choose to do a few things while in the middle of our circumstances.
- Face it head-on. We lose power over our circumstances when we decide to bury our head in the sand or be like Scarlett O’Hara and “think about it tomorrow”. When we accept and acknowledge our circumstances and know that “this too shall pass” then we gain the power back!
- Keep moving forward. We must refuse to let our circumstances paralyze us and continue to walk out our day-to-day lives. When we walk out one day we leave it behind giving us the promise of a new day ahead of us that’s filled with promises of new beginnings. And when we think we just can’t go on we can tell ourselves “We’re doing it” because we’re choosing to walk forward. In the case of Covid, we can face the fact that we will not get the first half of 2020 back and decide to keep moving forward even if it’s not turning out the way we had planned.
- Look at the big picture. In the midst of our circumstances, we must look at the big picture and realize that the chaos we’re experiencing today will one day be just a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter in the long biographical story of our life. One day generations that follow us will talk about the Pandemic of 2020 and our claim to fame (whether we like it or not) will be to say that we lived through it and came out on the other side.
- Make a “Good Things” List. An antidote to despair and heartache is gratitude. It’s important for us to focus on what we have, not on what we don’t. It’s important to look at the benefits of our circumstance and not the obstacles. To look for the silver lining and magnify the good. Every bad situation will have something that is positive-we just need to look for it! Even a dead clock shows the correct time twice a day! Grab a piece of paper and a pencil and write down all of the positive things happening around you.
My Friend, no matter how bad our circumstances seem right now, life has a way of changing them in ways we may never expect. One day we can use our mess into our message and bring value to the world by sharing it.
