I’ve seen so many people start out great. They are excited, full of energy, with high hopes for the future. But as we all know, life has a way of gut-kicking us at times. And we wind up on the sidelines, nursing our wounds wondering where we went wrong and how to get back in the game.
Here are five ways I have learned, in my own life, how I can sustain a passion for life, even in the midst of the pain, the reverses, and the unpredictable events of life.
- I see every day as a gift. Getting up every day and moving into life is a gift. It is the highest and best gift that God can give anyone: the gift of another day, another opportunity, another moment, another chance to make things right. Time is a gift. It is not owed to anyone, and it should be seen as the valuable, sacred stuff of life.
- I see every place as God’s place. Wherever you are, there you are. You may not want to be there, and you can wish you were somewhere else. But whether it’s the place of failure, divorce, reverse, procrastination, unemployment, sickness, or a thousand other of life’s calamities, this is the place that you find yourself. And because God always knows where you are, it’s also God’s place. It could be the sacred sanctuary in which God does the much-needed spade work on our soul.
- I see everything as useful. Every delay, every reversal, every missed deadline, or opportunity all work in the big picture of God’s providence to serve His purposes. Pain, sickness, unemployment, refusals, reversal, lay-offs, firings: all of these can be useful in the hands of God. He can redeem anything. He can reconcile any relationship. And He can restore anything that’s lost.
- I see everyone as someone worth loving. Stop looking at people as resources, and start looking at them as the reason you’re here: to love them, heal them, help them, give them a leg up, an encouraging word, or a thousand other ways in which we can employ our lives to make the world a better place, by making the people in it more hopeful, more healthy, and more fired-up about the future.
- I see every ending as a new beginning. Here is what I’ve discovered in life: we’re great at new beginnings; marriages, births, first day on the job. But we’re totally inept when it comes to endings. And yet, every new beginning has an ending. But it’s helped me to transform the way I look at things at the end by realizing that for everything that ends, there’s at least one new beginning out in front of me.
These are the five ways in which I sustain a passion for life. Discuss them with your team, your family. Ask them to interact. Add to the list if you find those that are meaningful and email them back to me. I would like to add them to my list too.