When the Next Adversity Doesn’t Wait

As I wrapped up our look at the seeds we can pull from the adversities involved with defending the vulnerable, I shared that Granny was nearly 97 years old when she passed away in August 2020. There’s always a degree of pain that comes with loss, but I was as grateful as anything; for the long life she lived, for the strong faith she modeled, and for all the lessons I learned from her in my 44 years to that point. Between all we worked through in the months leading up to her passing and the global disruptions that turned our business upside down, I would have welcomed a stretch of smooth sailing. It didn’t come.

That shouldn’t come as any real surprise. Intense pressure is what turns coal into diamonds. Dams are built all around the world to harness the tremendous energy of water to generate electricity that powers our largest cities. In both cases, pressure or the uncontrolled water can (and does) create devastating effects. But someone, at some point in history, identified and nurtured the seeds from adversities that led to incredible opportunities - opportunities that you and I still benefit from today.

In sports, there are breaks between periods and an allotted number of time-outs (in most cases) for a team to regroup. School, at all levels, has breaks between semesters. Both play a role in preparing us for the “real world,” but neither are as  harsh a judge as we will inevitably experience when it’s time to make a go of it on our own - and especially not when we’re striving toward something that makes a difference. A friend recently quoted Woodrow Wilson on social media in sharing, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” He followed that by saying “Communities need to grow or they will decay. It’s fair to argue how we grow, but growth is required for a sustainable future.” That growth he referred to is nearly always packed full of adversity, and neither the growth (or decay) or those adversities provide time-outs or semester breaks.

Surviving a defining moment of any kind does not exempt us from the next bad situation; it only reveals whether we will keep using the same tools. Eric Hoffer is quoted as saying, “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” If we remain intentional about finding every possible seed in each adversity we face AND we nurture those seeds to capture the great benefit hidden within them, we’ll have no choice but to use new tools, whatever those tools may be.

With so much of 2020 and the first half of 2021 being just plain hard, Cindy and I would have gladly welcomed an uneventful, business-as-usual year or two. We didn’t get it. But the foundation we had continued to build helped us navigate what followed. We’ll look at some of that next. Before that, though, think about a season when you thought you had “earned” a break and another hit arrived anyway. What emotion stands out from that time and what was one early warning sign that you may have treated your most previous crisis as the last lesson you would have to learn?