The Art of Reframing

• Someday we may be as grateful for the bad things as the good things, because the bad things helped prepare us for the good things.

I don’t know if I like for bad things to happen in my life. I usually am not jumping for joy or running around with a great big smile on my face when I am struggling through a hard time. I do not know too many people who would rank having cancer, dealing with the death of a child, bankruptcy, divorce or an addiction as one of the top events that they want to happen in their lives. Most of us want to pray that everyday would be rosy and easy, not filled with pot holes or broken roads.

Usually while we are going through those dark moments, we are usually asking, no begging, God to get us out of it. I have. I don’t like those dark moments or those trying times. I would rather have the peaches and roses days. I like the easy path. It does not require much of me and I can usually handle that path. But the dark moments usually require me to trust, lay everything of me into the hands of God, and allow him to guide me through it. Normally I am not asking God to reveal the truth he wants me to learn during those times as much as I am begging and pleading for those moments to be over quickly.

On the other side of bad things and having traveled a road that has carried dark moments, I have begun to notice two things, I am more dependent on God and I embrace the good things more than I did before. All those bad things give the good things in my life more joy and more blessing. Can bad things truly prepare me for the good things in my life? I think so.

*my thoughts from Chapter 4, In a Pit with a Lion on Snowy Day, Mark Batterson