For the past few years, instead of making New Year's resolutions, my friends and I have selected a word that would be our theme for the coming year. For 2012, I had selected the word "perspective". For the most part throughout my life I try to do the right thing...the right thing according to societial rules, personal integrity, and of course my belief in God and trying to follow His plan for me. I had noticed that as I would be trucking along the path of my life thinking everything was going well and I was doing my best, eventually I'd run into a road block. Sometimes a BIG roadblock. In the past I would find myself either beating my head against the roadblock or else sitting down in frustration and confusion wondering "why" the roadblock was there. Wasn't I doing what I was suppose to be doing? What had I done wrong? Why was God punishing me when I was trying to follow His commandments and do what He wanted me to do. Eventually I'd pick myself back up and look around only to be pleasantly surprised to notice that it wasn't acutally a roadblock in my path at all, but merely something put in my way to change my course either a little bit or a lot. The problem was that I would again start trucking down the path again...and when again I'd hit another roadblock, I'd again sit and wonder "why?" Hadn't I just changed my path, wasn't I doing what God wanted me to do now? It was as if I had forgotten (again) that they usually are not a roadblocks or a "punishments' because we have failed in some way, but often just a technique to get us to turn our head and look at a better place to continue our journey.
Over the past year, as I have been trucking down the path of my life and have hit those roadblocks, I have been much quicker to look around and see the other, usually much better, opportunities and blessings that God has waiting for me. No longer do I sit at the side of the road frustrated, but I immediately look at the new path and start running towards it.
As I look back on my life, I can now recognize that some of my biggest blessings have started out as some of the biggest crises in my own mind. I can see that the person I have become today has indeed been forged through some refining fires of trials and heartache. What a blessing this PERSPECTIVE has been in my life. It has brought me happiness, peace and contentment where before I had uncertainty, sadness and worry.
