Lemonade or Mountains?

When life gives lemons, make lemonade.  So says the collective wisdom of the grey-hairs who have gone before.

Is it so?

While I tire of endless Facebook posts about what kind of muffin you chose for breakfast today or your latest drama, I feel compelled to write about the setbacks that we face in the course of our normal lives.

I've had a setback recently and it has required me to (again) put my money where my mouth is.

So how do we deal with setbacks or bad news?  That is a quest worth taking because we all face challenges and how we choose to deal with them will have great impact.  Life sometimes isn't very fair; on the other hand, many times the setbacks that I face are of my own doing.  The fact is though, that no matter what causes our setbacks, we all have them.  That means that we all must deal with them.

As I've thought about setbacks over the last decade, I think that I've reached more clarity on this particular issue than I had previously.

I've discovered that hope is a tricky thing.  There was a time that I thought hope was an evil, heartless thing.  That might sound strange to you, but hear me out.  When I place my hope in a certain thing, all my eggs are in one basket.  What if that thing doesn't happen?  Where would I be then?  I can answer that: devastated.

Then, another plan comes along.  More hope, another path blocked, more devastation.  It'll drain your soul.

I call this type of thinking Temporal Hope.  It is the hope that we place in things, people, or events: "If this doesn't happen, I don't know where else to turn."  "He's just got to come through for me, or ..."

It's a sort of "if, then" thinking.  My happiness will come "if" a certain thing happens.

But, is our happiness (peace, well-being, mental health) really tied to events?  I have come to realize that it is not.

This is merely Temporal Hope.  It is worthless because it ties us to things that are uncertain and unpredictable.

What other option is available to us, then?  I think that we have to learn to have a much larger perspective on life.  That is the only way that we may truly experience the happiness that we seek.

Hope is only as good as its object.

If the object is temporal, so is the hope.  If the object is eternal, so is the hope.

What this means is that we must find something larger than an event or a physical object in which to place our hope.  Since that object, as already discussed shouldn't be a thing, an event or a human, it leaves us with limited options.  There is only one thing that is none of these three: God. 

God is not bound in time or space and he has an eternal perspective rather than a temporal one.

And he's the God who has prepared an eternity for all of us.  Placing our hope in God changes the equation dramatically because hope is only as good as its object.  If hope's object is God, it's better than gold-plated.

This I call Eternal Hope.

The bottom line of Eternal Hope is that events during our life here on earth are only important insofar as they help us to become more like him.  The events themselves are of no particular importance, because eternity is not bound by the temporal events that shape our lives.  Eternity is only impacted by our response to them.

My brain, probably like yours, tends to hang its hat on the temporal every time events seem to overtake me.  But, I find myself returning to this bit of wisdom time and time again.  It takes a certain discipline to do so, because my feelings get in the way.  As I practice it, though, it has gotten easier.

I must look farther than I can actually see.  I must look to the promise that awaits at the end of this life.

Think of it like this.  Temporal Hope requires us to depend solely upon ourselves, upon the tracks that we make.  It's like looking down at our feet all of the time and never lifting our heads to see the wonder and beauty of the world around us.

Eternal Hope is like looking at the mountains as we walk.  We disregard the rocky trail because we know that the majesty of the mountains looms before us.

So, I choose not to trip over the rocks as I stare at my feet lest I miss the mountains that await me.

Eternally yours,

TheCurmudgeon