Surviving the Worst Day of Your Life

SOONER or later we all have one of these: what qualifies as the worst day of our life.

You’ve already had one, perhaps several, but, and I hate to be the bearer of such a fact, there is another one coming.  If I could be allowed to extend the truth further, I could say there will be more than one.

Life does not get easier.  It gets harder.  It gets harder because we are more and more sown into life the longer we live.  From only being worried for ourselves, then we have families, and then our children have their own kids.  The older we get, the more our own mortality’s positioned front and centre.  That’s just two examples.  We have, typically, more to lose the longer we live.  This is not so much a depressing truth, but a truth that will undergird us if we’ll configure life around such a truth.

The longer we live, the wiser we should become, and that wisdom is underscored most when we accept we do not control life.  God does.

Age provides us the wisdom that compels us to believe we cannot trust in our own strength.  Sooner or later life smashes us sufficiently that we learn, once and for all, that weakness is best, so that His strength might embody us.  Embodying us, this strength first becomes ours in the secrecy of our consciousness alone.  And here’s an indelible irony!  Even in weakness, we have praise for what God’s showing us; we’re frustrated that we cannot shout about it from the rooftops.  But ultimately people do catch on; there’s something irretrievably inimitable about us.  Such weakness, in God, is the greatest of all gifts in this broken life, if His love weren’t already the supreme gift.

And it’s in this state of being sufficiently weak in His strength we’re best situated, in meeting the worst day of our lives; so it’s not so hard!

One thing that ‘worst days’ are designed to teach us is that attitude trumps circumstance.

But we won’t know the importance of our attitude until we try the futility of railing against life when life’s at its worst.

Surviving the worst day of our lives is as simple as knowing our perception is our biggest barrier to overcome.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.