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A passage in the daily devotional Streams in the
Desert, published by Cowman more than eighty
years ago, describes the very problems and
difficulties that we face as opportunities. It
is the trials we face that make us stronger and
ultimately result in success. I am reminded of
the new movie that just came out about Chris
Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness. It is a true
story of how Chris was homeless and struggling
to survive, alongside his son. Things were so
bad that Chris and his son spent a few nights in
a public bathroom. It doesn’t get much more
difficult than this. But Chris stayed focused
and never lost faith and ultimately became a
multi-millionaire, and in the meantime raised
his son successfully. They spent every moment
together, which Chris says today was the most
important thing. Even though they had to move
around a lot and didn’t know where their next
meal would come from, he and his son were
together. I particularly like the way Cowman
relates the way we face difficulties. She
describes an eagle watching a storm coming. This
is relevent because we too often fear “a parade
of imagined horrors”, as one of my colleagues
used to say. Usually our fears are never really
manifested as they were for Gardner. Listen to
the words of Cowman, and imagine yourself as
facing the world, facing your difficulties and
problems as the eagle does: “Like the eagle, who
sits on a crag and watches the sky as it is
filling with blackness, and the forked
lightnings are playing up and down, and he is
sitting perfectly still, turning one eye and
then the other toward the storm. But he never
moves until he begins to feel the burst of the
breeze and knows that the hurricane has struck
him; with a scream, he swings his breast to the
storm, and uses the storm to go up to the sky;
away he goes, borne upward upon it.” |
