Making Your Pain Your Strength

December is a unique time of the year. As Christmas approaches and the year comes to a close, everything in our lives seems amplified. Sometimes, the most amplified things are the struggles we face, or the things in our lives we feel are missing. As human beings, it’s easy to allow these things to consume us, forgetting who we are, and who we’re supposed to be.

Christmas and New Year’s can be the best time of the year, but it can sometimes feel like the worst. These are the days where we want everything to be perfect, and these are the days we feel it most when they are not.

The holidays put a magnifying glass on everything bothering us. Many of us might be facing broken relationships, lost loved ones, family dissension, economic disparity, health related scares, or loneliness. Whether you’re going through one of these things, or everything on the list, there’s still hope.

Each struggle has an origin, and each struggle serves a purpose. What needs to be determined, is are your life’s struggles for the right reason’s or the wrong ones? Are you struggling because you followed your dream, or because you were afraid to? Because you told the truth, or because you lied? Because you had the courage to let go, or because your fear of change made you hold on to tight? Because you loved and lost, or because you were too afraid to love at all? Because you fought your addiction, or because you gave into it? Each option poses a painful challenge; the key is to accept the one that will make you better, not worse.

Our Struggles Give Us Our Humanity

Without making mistakes there’s no way to learn and move forward. Progress is only made through failure. Through our mistakes we learn how to create our success. This can be applied in any area of life, whether it’s personal, professional, economical, etc. No matter what you’re involved in, you will face a point in time where a personal struggle will engulf your life. Real heroes are judged by how they react in the face of overwhelming odds (George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Jesus Christ, etc.). We all face moments that we don’t understand, but there has to come a time when we accept what life has laid before us, and we use it to become who we’re supposed to be.

Regardless of where you are, and how you’ve handled you’re life’s challenges to this point, you can be certain that others around you are about to deal with life altering strife of their own. There will be a time when you can share what you’ve learned, and when you can turn your pain into strength for someone else. One day you can be thankful for the tests that life has put you through, because it allowed you to teach another person how to pass the tests life has laid before them.

This holiday season I want you to embrace the pains that have put you in touch with your humanity. These pains will give you the gift of compassion, and your compassion will give you the gift of helping those who need it.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year