Do you know a single person who hasn't had a terrible life? Everyone I know has. Terrible. They've lost a child or suffered cancer, or lost a spouse or been financially devastated or had their dreams crushed, or were divorced or had their kids destroyed with drugs, or never were able to bear children, or were raped or abused by their parents, or suffer terrible pain, or are consumed with lonliness,....or had a terrible accident. It's just terrible! It appears to be the nature of life. How then do we go on?
Alcohol tends to help. A good glass of brandy can make most things seems less dark. Pills help. For a short time. Very ineffective and not recommended, but they're a source of Terrible irradication. My personal favorite is potato chips and appricot brandy. Something about the sweet and salty takes me away to a better place if but only a short and unproductive while.
I have lived a rather charmed life. One where terrible didn't penetrate. Terrible was all around but didn't poke my skin. Terrible moved in one day and tried to make a home. Terrible has a way of taking charge.
What I've learned is that family and friends are the gift God gives us to put a barrier up against Terrible. What we've been given through the people we know has been nothing short of a miracle and Terrible has moved out. Terrible comes sometimes in the night, lonely and afraid, but Terrible does not live here.
I have friends who have had their children murdered, watched their spouses die in their arms, and have friends find comfort in suicide. These are terrible. How my friends survive is beyond me. God gives strength. Strength that brandy or potato chips or pills cannot provide. God is how people survive Terrible.
Everyone I know has had a terrible life. Being a quadriplegic family is terrible. But, comfort comes in friends, in the random visitors, in family and in self. God has put a small seed of love and knowing in our hearts and this too shall pass. How we all get through the tough stuff of life is quite a miracle. I choose to call our miracle God.
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Its odd, but sometimes when I've been in the middle of experiencing a terrible time in life, I look to others terrible times and somehow my own feel less terrible. Acceptance of the fact that life is not intended to be easy but to prepare us for the future, the job we will have in eternity, is what helps terrible become less so. It is temporary, there is hope. We are just a passin' through and our life here on earth is but a dot on the eternal timeline. Imagine eternity without terribleness. It makes our temporal situations fade a bit. I have found that there will always be another side of the page, but only God can turn it in his time. We sometimes must read and re-read the page until it sinks into our consciouness to find what was good about the terribleness this time. It sounds like you have often found that. But then it may be something different the next time you read that same page. How many facets does terrible have, anyway? The cutter of the jewel knows the more facets the more ability to reflect light.
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