Everything Happens for a Reason

My family and I were recently going around the table at New Years sharing some things we were celebrating.

My wife Melissa shared something that really resonated with me.

While others were sharing about their healthy families and financial blessings, she said, “I’m thankful for the blessings and also for the challenges because I think they made me stronger.”

One area that I focused on toward the latter part of 2019 was being resilient in the face of trials.

While I didn’t have anything catastrophic happen, I have experienced multiple trials over the past couple of years. The reality is that we all have. In fact, life is a series of challenges. No matter how positive we think, trials will come and find us. As you know, it’s not the trials that define us but how we look at and respond to them.

Some things just happen and others are the result of bad decisions. Either way, we can waste time and energy crying about it or learn from them and move on. Of course there is nothing wrong with processing emotions first.

By age 19, I’d saved up twenty thousand dollars only to lose it all after following some bad investing advice from an ex brother-in-law.

At age 25, I bought a house at the peak of the housing market that for several reasons is worth less now than when I bought it (15 years later).

I was recently reading about Thomas Edison, who at age 67, watched his life’s work burn up right in front of him.

How did he react? He said, “It’s all right. We just got rid of a lot of rubbish.” Of course he could have cried about it. He lost the equivalent of 23 million dollars in today’s money due to being under insured.

Edison later said that at 67 he wasn’t too old to rebuild. And rebuild he did. That same year he made 200 plus million in today’s money cranking out all kinds of new inventions.

Many people let the perceived negative things that happen in life get them down and forward progress stops. Successful people know and expect problems and become better not necessarily in spite of them but because of them!