As beautiful as life is, it isn’t necessarily easy. A friend of ours recently returned from a fabulous overseas trip, bearing new appreciation for the privilege of travel but also an antibiotic-resistant bacteria that took weeks to conquer. Another friend was offered the job of a lifetime in a distant state, packed up and moved, though it meant a separation of hundreds of miles from loved ones. Yet another friend retired after a long and fulfilling career in order to focus finally on his passion for painting, only to learn that he is losing his sight.
You probably know of similar examples of life’s bounty being tempered by loss, of its pleasures being offset by some pain, of its opportunities being met with a few stumbling blocks. In fact, haven’t we all discovered, after several decades have rolled by, that we cannot expect life to be an uninterrupted series of smooth seas and perfect sunsets? As glorious as this ride through life may be, it will offer its ups and downs.
So how do you do it? How do you get by – or better yet, how do you flourish despite the difficulties life has handed you? Do you have a formula for facing the hard times, or a system for meeting tests and trials? Have you got some tools for crisis management?
That marvelously insightful author, Anne Lamott, in her book “Traveling Mercies,” made this observation: “It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said ‘do the best you can with these, they will have to do’. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”
Yes, odds are that life will serve us with some unwelcome circumstances, but we usually have what we need to face them and even to surmount them. We don’t really need any glitzy maneuvers or glamorous equipment. We simply need to rely upon the trusty old tools we all have at our disposal – friendship, prayer, conscience, honesty and other gifts of faith such as hope, endurance, forgiveness, loyalty, kindness and love.
It’s true that we may initially discount the need for those very sturdy tools that develop in the lives of faithful people. Some have argued rather persuasively, after all, that faith is simply a crutch for people who otherwise could not get by on their own. But when the rubber hits the road, and we are facing something that seems beyond our capacity to overcome, we realize we are among those people in need of a crutch.
Of course we cannot get by on our own. No one can. Life seems intent upon teaching us that lesson. But learning to rely upon the strength of our faith and its trustworthy tools is a lesson capable of carrying us past hardships and heartaches. Without a doubt, we have at our disposal, all we need to get by.
