Powering Through Adversity

A friend came to me the other day and shared with me the story of another friend of hers. I'll call her Lisa. Lisa has an intense story in her life and is climbing a mountain of adversity.

Lisa has three boys, her oldest is four, her middle is two, and her youngest is nine months. Her oldest was born with her first husband. After a very violent and abusive marriage, Lisa was able to get away and filed for divorce. Her ex got partial custody of their son and one day when she was bringing her son to him for visitation, he raped Lisa and she got pregnant with her second son. Not long after, Lisa married again. But during her pregnancy with her youngest, her second husband, a schizophrenic with no job, left her and moved in with his mother. He is currently fighting for custody of the baby, whom he has never met and is still being nursed. Lisa, currently enrolled in college, is unemployed and living in a one bedroom apartment. The boys share the bedroom, and Lisa sleeps on the couch. To say she has little to offer her boys is an understatement. I heard Lisa's story and felt compelled to act, to do something for her. Recently I did a major overhaul on our toy room... I have a pile larger than my kids of toys that are going to be donated. Immediately, I raided the pile looking for anything for boys four years and younger. There was a plethora and I happily pulled them out, loaded them into laundry baskets and brought them to my friend. These toys, despite their use, were still in excellent condition. I made sure these boys got the best!

My friend brought Lisa our donation two days ago and she was so overwhelmed, and her boys had died and gone to heaven over their new toys. Lisa's first response... tears... and then gratitude. Lisa paints rocks, beautiful, intricate paintings on these rocks you can fit in the palm of your hand, and hides them around the city with a note to either keep and enjoy, or to re-hide for someone else to find. Lisa had painted a rock with the simple word peace on it. But she felt this rock wasn't meant to be hidden but rather that someone special needed it. She found the rock and gave it to our mutual friend and said, "This is for her. I feel she is the one meant for this rock."

My friend brought me that rock and I took one look at it and nearly broke down. It was exactly what I needed in the moment. In my current season of adversity, that rock brought me the very thing painted across it... peace. It was more than worth the full value of everything I could have given her.

Here she was, with nothing to offer but a rock, which became everything to me.

Lisa is standing at the bottom of a mountain of adversity. But she's making the best of it, and is fighting like hell for those three little boys that depend on her.

"Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes." - Buddha

Today, I face my own mountain of adversity, as I'm sure every one of you face. Adversity is a part of life. We've gotten through it in the past, may be standing in the middle of it now, and we will undoubtedly face it again in the future. The adversities we face in our life do not define us. They don't determine our paths and where we go. Instead, we forge our own paths through our reactions, our responses to adversity. We can't control circumstance, but we get to decide what we do with it, and where we take ourselves because of it.

Here are a few ways to arm ourselves when our seasons of adversity fall upon us:

• Resiliency: don't give in to fear, anger, or despair. Move forward, past the pain and grief, by setting goals that go beyond yourself. They don't have to be big lofty goals, but rather goals than can serve as stepping stones along your journey. Goals can help lead us in the direction we want to ultimately go in.
• Strong sense of purpose: nothing reveals who we are more than adversity does. Knowing yourself, and what is at the core of who you are will help forge your path in the right direction because you know where you want to go. Adversity becomes a lesson. Not a setback. We can bend in the face of hard times, but we will not break.
• Acceptance: hard times will always fall upon us, and learning to accept them when we enter a season of adversity doesn't mean we are giving up, it means we are letting ourselves feel the full range of emotion that comes with it. We give ourselves grace in pain and grief. When we accept and acknowledge our mountains of adversity, then we can begin to scale them.
• Self-reliance: when we pair our strong sense of purpose with self-reliance, we understand that we have what it takes to move forward. We may not always be certain of our steps as we begin our climb, but we believe in ourselves, in our purpose, and we believe that we already have the capability within us to make the trek. 
• Strong support system: in times of crisis, we don't have to fight alone. We may have the tools within us to traverse our adversity, but when we have a strong support system, we have people to journey alongside us. No man is an island, and we don't have to be alone, isolated, and made to go through our hard times solo. We just have to be brave enough to reach out.

In times of uncertainty, never forget who you are, what dreams you have, or that you are loved. Give yourself grace when you are in pain or are grieving, but rely on who you know yourself to be to help pull you through your season and take you to where you want to be. Like the tagline on the header of the blog... Sometimes we win. Sometimes we learn. Let those lessons strengthen you and give you a deeper understanding of who you are. Let them strengthen your resolve, and live in the knowledge that you can get through your time of adversity. Let your heart find peace. Girl, power through. You've got this.