​Sometimes it’s really hard to keep your focus where it belongs, especially when there are so many ways to be distracted. It’s hard to have confidence that things will work out, which they inevitably do, and often times better than we could have planned. We get so mired down in our anxious “what ifs” that we forget about trust, about faith, about believing the promises that we’ve been given.  
We let the things that happen in our lives, become the center of our universe. We let the countless crises of daily living overwhelm us, define us,  pulling us downward into a spiraling black hole of both the serious and the petty, until we are rife with bitterness and anger.

In times like these, when I’m worried about what seems to me to be a dead end, a hopeless situation, or when I don’t think I have the strength or courage to carry on, I try to remember what Paul says to the Philippians in chapter 4 verses 11-13. “I have learned to be satisfied with the things I have and with everything that happens. I know how to live when I am poor, and how to live when I have plenty. I’ve learned the secret of being happy at any time and in everything that happens…I can do all things though Christ, because he gives me strength.” It helps me to refocus on the tasks at hand, to concentrate on doing my very best, this day, right now, no matter the circumstances, in spite of the “shit storm” that surrounds me, to find solace in the day to day activities of life.

The point is in this: We must learn contentment, happiness. Life is filled with ups and downs, twists and turns, celebrations and disappointments, it’s the nature of the beast. These things are just weigh stations along the way, meant to hone us, temper us, points on the map of our journey, not the journey itself. They sculpt us, mold us, not define us. Satisfaction, comes from knowing that we are more than the points on our maps, and that no matter where those points take us, if we lean not on our own understanding, but God’s, we’ll get through it all.

~SLM