Why Me, Lord?

You have had a tough day.  You were fired from your job, had a flat tire, and arrive home only to find out that your spouse or partner has moved out.  You look to the heavens and say ‘why me, Lord’!  When times get tough, and they do for all of us, many of us let the sheer number of problems in our life overshadow our ability to cope with any problem.  We wonder why all these things are happening to us.  Did we do something wrong in a past life?  Is God punishing us for something?  There are thousands of explanations out there for why these things are happening to you.

You could spend a great deal of time and energy looking for ‘the reason’ for all of your problems.  Edward Everett Hale said ‘never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have’.  Are you bearing all your troubles at once? This can become a heavy load!

Maybe the thing to do is just accept the fact that you are going to be presented with problems (challenges!), fix them if you can, and go on with your life.  Theodore Rubin said ‘the problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem’.

There is no grand scheme to make your life miserable!  No, the rest of the world did not met last night to figure out how to make you unhappy today.  Alexander Graham Bell said 'when one door closes, another door opens.  However, we tend to focus on the door that closed'.  Stop dwelling on your troubles (the closed door) and seek that open door for new opportunities!  Prioritize your problems and work on them one at a time.  You can’t solve them all at once.

- Joe Freeman