HOW DO WE REMAIN THANKFUL WHEN TIMES ARE TOUGH?
- HAPLOUS
- Nov 2, 2018
- 2 min read
Somebody wronged you. Things are going haywire and it’s of no fault of your own. You’ve been trying to do the right things, live the right way, but situations STILL aren’t working out in your favor. How do you cope? How do you resist the urge to give up? How do you continue to do the right things even when you’re not seeing any immediate benefits from “living the right way”?
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” --Ephesians 2:8
One of the secrets to living a happier life is to adopt an attitude of gratitude, even when everything and everyone else in the world is telling you that you should be upset. When you’ve been wronged, or things don’t go your way, oftentimes people will tell you, “You didn’t deserve that.” or “I know what I’D do if someone ever did that to me.”
And you know what? There is some truth to those statements. Bad things happen to good people. Sometimes the cookie crumbles completely outside of our favor. It’s not fair. And it hurts.
But you know who is a much better person than you or me and who suffered more injustice than any person ever? Jesus. You probably know this. But it’s hard to remember when your heart is stinging after you’ve been burned. It’s HARD to be thankful in every situation.
You don’t have to handle every situation perfectly. You don’t have to immediately smile in the face of suffering. But somewhere you CAN start is to remember Jesus’ face when something like this happens to you. Even better, you can tell Him how hurt you are. You can ask Him, “why has this happened to me?” You can lean on Him for comfort when nothing anybody says or does seems to make you feel better.
Slowly but surely, Jesus’ love will begin to heal those wounds. Run to Him when you’ve been hurt. It all begins with the #babysteps
Xx
I apologize, I was responding to what i thought was the same blog post that Fox News picked up and published where you made this reference. you clearly did not make this reference in this abbreviated post above.
Your reference to “God never gives us more than we can handle” is a very common mistake... this is actually not in the Bible. This is often confused with I Cor 10:13 where Paul is speaking about temptation - where God promises to provide a way of escape when we are tempted beyond what we are able to resist. I can personally attest to the fact that we do sometimes go through trials that we cannot handle. God allows these to (I believe) force us to turn to Him as our sole source of comfort. As Believers we can go through times that do break us. These times are excruciatingly hard. To think otherwise is a ‘pollyanna’ form of the…
As I look back on my yesteryears I found the path that Robert Frost spoke about in his poem about taking the road less travelled. It was a road that was laid out for my family by the voice that one morning told me "It's not about you John, it's about me". It scared me, yet it has such power of calmness. I was a new born again Christian, we were being evicted from our forclosed rented condo, and had only $67 in our savings account. We didn't know what to do. Then God showed us a path to a perfect house to rent. The landlord was reluctant to rent to us, and it became our home for the las…