“Triumph Through Adversity”
Very seldom in life do we overcome challenges by simply going OVER them or around them. We have to go through them. That is the place where most people get stuck. They doubt themselves. They question their goal. They wonder “Why?” Why me? Why do I have to? They think that life isn’t fair. Rather, they truly BELIEVE life isn’t fair or that life sometimes gets too hard. Adversity can make us feel inadequate. Adversity can make us want to give up. Adversity can make us bitter.
The last one is the one that slowly poisons us. That bitterness seeps out into everything else we do. For example, there are women who made the intentional choice to “give up on men” after a string of bad experiences because they’ve realized their worth or the importance of building their own healthy self-esteem. Then there’s the other group…the women who’ve given up on men because the men they’ve chosen have failed them over and over. They’ve come to a point where they have a hard time trusting anyone. Where they feel that there must be something wrong with them. They’ve internalized the adversity. This is the key.
When we internalize adversity, we look at it as a reflection of ourselves. True maybe there is a lesson for us to learn. But the adversity itself is not an indicator of our strength or our courage. It is not a judgment on the quality of our hopes or our dreams. We think the adversity cannot be changed. We think it to be insurmountable and therefore, we conclude the problem to be with us. That we are the ones who are weak, who are incapable. We think that we must have been dreaming too big.
I think many of us can look back to times in our lives when we struggled. Gosh, I can look back to a multitude of struggles. Remember high school? Where we kept trying to fit in? Wondering if we had the right clothes or right hair or the right shoes? And that if we didn’t fit in with the popular kids, there was something wrong with us.
How about parenting? When we try so hard and our kids still struggle with anxiety or self-esteem or independence. When we think we are being clear and the kids still don’t do their chores on time as expected. We question our own parenting and sometimes we question whether we have it in us.
Some adversities are small (not unimportant though), like putting together a talk for work. Some adversities are big, like getting a job. Some adversities are short-lived—your child’s temper tantrum this morning or the venue you wished for not being available on your wedding day. Other adversities last for a long time—raising children, taking care of ill family members, working through debt, studying, and preparing for college or medical school.
Each of these will test us. They will test our confidence, our resolve, our strength, our courage, our determination and our faith. That’s Faith with a capital F. Not only having faith in ourselves that we will work through our adversity but Faith in God that we will TRIUMPH through our adversities.
Some of you may not have a relationship with God and that’s ok. I’m not here to change that for you. What’s important is that when working through your adversities, sometimes you need to surround yourself with people who support you, who bring out the best in you, who believe in you, and who will have the courage to tell you the truth. But none of those people can tell you whether your dream is worth believing in. Many may tell you how difficult it is to do what you’re setting out to do. Maybe you’re the first person in your family to go to college or even to graduate high school. Maybe you’ve had a child really young and are doubting whether you can do this.
No one has the right to tell you that your dreams are not possible. And if they do..well, I had a boyfriend in college who told me that my dream of wanting to spend some time in a rural village in India practicing medicine was really difficult. That relationship didn’t last long. It wasn’t about whether I actually achieved my dream; it was that he didn’t support me in it.
I got to where I got to not because someone paved the path for me and laid out clear instructions. Not because someone knew someone and secured me the golden job. Not because I had a lot of money or influential friends and family. I got to where I got to because I believed in the integrity of my dreams. When I was in high school, I wanted to go to Rwanda in the middle of a genocide and help. I had no idea what help I was going to be able to give. And my parents clearly didn’t let me go. But that didn’t stop that intense inner desire of wanting to help others. I grew up doing a lot of community service activities. I continued the same in college. Those deep wishes of wanting to help others less fortunate of wanting to be a doctor—whether in an African country or on some other mission trip—are what spurred me on to study hard, to prep for my entrance exams, and the hardest part—to stay the course once I was in medical school because I was ready to quit every few months.
All of the great movies—whether Marvel’s Ironman or a girl sailing around the world at age 16, or a baseball team overcoming great odds—appeal to us because they shine a spotlight on persevering when things don’t seem to be in our favor. They highlight the strength and courage and bold conviction it takes to stay true to what you believe in no matter what the nay-sayers will say. And they all point out how even the greatest and strongest and most talented of us can sometimes lose sight of our dreams or lose faith in ourselves or even in God.
The struggles in life are real. And they are hard. They are painful. They push us to our max and sometimes feel like they stretch us beyond our limits. It would be so much easier to just give up. To throw our hands up and say “Forget it.” To think that our dream was stupid and that we were stupid for even dreaming it. But I’m here to tell you to never give up. Never give up on the integrity of your dreams. That dream came into your heart for a reason and it’s yours. The path may be full of challenges but when you look back on your journey, you (and you alone) will realize what it took to get to where you are. You alone will see how much you grew—physically, mentally, spiritually—in the process of staying true to yourself.