There is a quote that says “A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.”. I believe that to be true.
Just when you are at peace in your life and things seem to be calm and on the up and up, a traumatic or painful event or series of events can turn your life upside down. The sudden impact of this suffering causes a fork in the road. Our expectations and the reality we face crash together like two tectonic plates and it changes the directional path of our journey. If our pain is not addressed properly, it can lead to dysfunction. This is one choice in the fork. We can choose to make poor decisions in the wake of pain. We do this for a slew of reasons. Pain feeds greedily on blame. We typically have to blame something or someone in rebellion to a life that we felt betrayed us. It's true. If it's a relationship problem, we tend blame the other person. If it's a problem with children, many parents blame themselves. If there is a death of a child or someone close to you, people tend to blame God. Blame should have no place in our lives! The other choice, the alternate path, is to learn and grow. Take physical exercise for instance (working out either at home or at the gym) it's painful to strengthen our muscles and grow our endurance, but all in all, it's good for us. Obviously we should never go looking for painful moments to add to our lives, but we can understand that the chaos it causes is not meant to destroy us but to develop us. Pain can be used to mold us into the person God wants us to be. It might be hard to understand in the moment, but we can take comfort knowing God never makes mistakes and He always knows what is best for us. So when you get to that fork in your road, you have two choices.
These choices are not easy. After all, we had a straight path.
We could see the horizon and pain has shifted the journey.
It’s not that pain knocks us off course, it just realigns the track. When things go far left...we only see how big our problems are and we forget how big our God is. Challenging times are inevitable and more often than not, some circumstances are beyond our control. The good news here is that God is in control. So take heart child of God...you are tough and you WILL get through this! With God, all things are possible!