When Things Aren't "Right"

Our natural tendency is to want everything to go well. We all want a "and they all lived happily ever after" kind of life.  But it's not to be. At the worst, really bad stuff happens, and at the very least, not all our dreams come true.  How do you face difficulty?  When things go wrong, when bad stuff happens, how do you manage?

Part of the source of anger we feel when things go badly is that our agenda, our plan, our expectation was blocked.  We get married and have all these expectations of life, love and belonging.  Then there's the accident or disease or growing apart, and instead of all our visions of the future, the marriage ends and the anger we feel, at least in part, finds its source in our blocked agenda.  We sign up for a class we really want to take, and we believe that the class will enable us. We imagine painting masterpieces, or becoming a math wiz, a computer game designer, or a wise financial investor, but the teacher isn't very good or the class is at a very different level of expertise than we are.  Maybe we try some of the class ideas, and we just can't seem to master them.  Then we get mad because the agenda of our expectations is blocked. 

When life throws us a curve ball, how do we handle it?

One of the most insightful helps to handling the bad stuff or the good stuff gone bad is something I read about in Jim Collin's book, Good to Great.  He writes about an interview with Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was tortured over 20 times during his eight years in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp.  Jim asked him how he could deal with that incarceration not knowing how the story would end.  Stockdale said, "I never lost faith in the end of the story.  I never doubted, not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end an turn the experience into the defining event of my life which, in retrospect, I would not trade."

When Collins asked him who didn't make it out, I was surprised by the answer.  It was the optimists.  Stockdale said, "The optimists were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again.  And they died of a broken heart."

On page 86 in Good to Great, there is the Stockdale Paradox. On one side—Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties . . . AND at the same time on the other side—Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

As one of the farmyard animals in the movie Babe, said, "The way things are is the way things are." When our agendas get blocked—the simple agenda of being to work on time and there's a traffic jam, to our life agenda with a life partner and all that entails ending by the tragedy of death or divorce—how will we handle it?

Hopefully, we will move forward best with both faith and candor. Faith that we will prevail in the end regardless of current circumstances, and without illusion or fantasy, confronting the cold hard brutal facts of our current reality and not live in denial or dishonesty.

Shifting from our personal experience when things aren't right for us, what about where things aren't right in our world? Injustice is real. People get shot—with intention or by accident.  Forty-eight million Americans will experience inadequate food this year.  Young girls are stolen from their African village.  Rampaging extremists kill all the men in a town. Children are sold and enslaved.

With all the evil in the world, we might be tempted to say, "It will all work out," or we might simply be overwhelmed by the badness.

But an alternative in our own lives and in our culture could be to become people of faith who hold tenaciously to the hope that one day all will be set right (God wins) and who, in the mean time, acknowledge the hard cold brutal facts in order to push back and be instruments of peace and justice where things aren't right.  

So, to what place of paradox is God calling you?  Where are you uniquely equipped to hold prevailing faith in one hand and confrontation with reality in the other? 

Andy McDonald