Staying Power

Faith supplies staying power. It contains dynamic to keep one going when the going is hard. Anybody can keep going when the going is good, but some extra ingredient is needed to enable you to keep fighting when it seems that everything is against you.

You may counter, "But you don’t know my circumstances. I am in a different situation than anybody else and I am as far down as a human being can get.

In that case you are fortunate, for if you are as far down as you can get there is no further down you can go. There is only one direction you can take from this position, and that is up. So your situation is quite encouraging. However, I caution you not to take the attitude that you are in a situation in which nobody has ever been before. There is no such situation. 

Practically speaking, there are only a few human stories and they have all been enacted previously. This is a fact that you must never forget – there are people who have overcome every conceivable difficult situation, even the one in which you now find yourself and which to you seems utterly hopeless. So did it seem to some others, but they found an out, a way up, a path over, a pass through.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

Underlying Emptiness

Think of the person (who) loses a job or a girlfriend and then finds himself in despair. The real cause of the despair is not the man’s loss of the job or the girlfriend. What the loss of the job or girlfriend really reveal is that the person was in despair all along, that his identity was built on something too fragile to be the basis of selfhood. When this fragile basis for identity is shattered, the self’s underlying emptiness was revealed.

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

How to Grieve

There are recovery programs for people grieving the loss of a parent, sibling, or spouse. You can buy books on how to cope with the death of a beloved pet or work through the anguish of a miscarriage. We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.

Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday 

People prefer the Illusion

People do not want truth; they prefer to believe what makes them happy. People prefer to live in illusions, even though the illusion masks the truth that their condition is one of despair, and they regard anyone who wishes to give them the truth about the condition as their enemy.  -C. Stephen Evans

Possibility and Despair

Possibility … is to human existence what vowels are to speech. To live in pure possibility is like an infants utterance of vowel sounds, which fail to express something that is definite and clear. Vowels alone do not make for articulate speech, although without them nothing can be said at all. Similarly, “if a human existence is brought to the point where it lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in deeper every moment it lacks possibility.” One cannot breathe without oxygen, but it is also impossible to breathe pure oxygen. Possibility is a kind of spiritual oxygen that a person cannot live without, but one cannot live on pure possibility either.

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

A Time of Nothingness

The problem is not that we don’t want to give up a job or a relationship, or that we can’t let go of our identity or our reality. The problem is that before we can find a new something, we must deal with a time of nothingness. And that prospect awakens old fears..

William Bridges, Transitions

The joy of third place

Is third place better than coming in second? Third seems to be a better result if you are in the Olympics. Psychologists at Cornell University say their research shows bronze-medal winners are generally happier than silver medalists. Why? When you come in second place, you focus on what you might have done differently to win. When you come in third you are happy just to get a medal.

The phenomenon of "what if" reasoning (knows as Counterfactual thinking) leads us to imagine how things could have been different rather than on what actually has happened. The bronze winners generally think “what if” I hadn’t won anything and they realize how fortunate they are to be on the podium. But for the silver medalist, “what if” means pondering the little things that might have turned silver into gold. 

It seems counterfactual thinking plays out, not just in games, but in everyday life. If a student misses making a grade of "A" by one point, having scored a "B" is no longer so satisfying. 

"Would I be happier today if only I had married someone else?" “What if I had attended a different school or majored in another field?” “Suppose I had selected a different profession?” 

Miss a flight by five minutes and you are frustrated. But if there’s no way you could make the flight you don't waste time on it. It's like the football team that loses in the final seconds of a game. If the team had gotten blown out, the players could more easily put it behind them and move on. But when victory was so very close, they can always think of little things they might have done differently to affect the outcome.    

Do you puzzle over what you might have done until you what-if yourself into dissatisfaction? Do you get stuck thinking about what almost happened? Do you feel like you are the silver medalist in life?  

It's worth noting that first place has its pitfalls as well. Research indicates that the first runner in a long-distance race puts in three times more effort to maintain that position than the runner-up. The researchers recommend when you are in the lead you should focus on the struggle with oneself rather than the pace of the other runners. 

Stephen Goforth