Adversity is the story of opportunity of giant problems overcome

Every great story is great, not because there was no adversity, but because those adversities were overcome. This concept of the overcoming life is the gospel imperative.

Just think of your favourite movies and books and the narratives that are woven through them. Truly the greatest movies and books are filled with intrigue, as if the deeper the problems, the more impossible the odds, the greater the ending when the problem is resolved.

I know movies are designed that way i.e. to entertain; but, just think, when we face insurmountable odds, we need belief in a bigger ideal or we just despair of it all.

To make of our lives anything at all,
we must believe that goodness
will fill the narrative.

Your story is not just
about where you ARE.
It’s also about
where you’ll BE.

Anyone who knows even the tiniest amount about literature knows that you need a problem to make a story. The story doesn’t work otherwise. Not only would the story be boring, it wouldn’t make any sense.

Your life was designed
from the beginning
to make sense,
even if it seems
to make no sense right now.

This is not to say for one moment that every problem is good. Many problems that beset our lives are brought about by evil. God hates it. But God overcame evil, and God gives us power to do that in our lives through a divine overcoming power. This is no mirage of eventual disappointment.

Is any of this about minimising the problems of evil? No, just the opposite. Only when we reveal evil for what it is, do we begin to overcome it. We need to take the “D” out of the “devil” and call it for what’s left over: “evil”.

We can apply this to our own lives—to the stories God is weaving through our time on earth, and through the meta-narrative that gets sung in heaven one day. These threads only God knows the ending to.

If our lives were sitting on lounges watching Netflix and eating Doritos, and that was the sum of our life, from one aspect at least, we should feel short-changed. That’s not life. Sure, there are plenty of times when we’ll engage in insignificant activities that we can claim as restful, but these are not the times we were made for.

We were made for a conquest. We were put on this earth to experience true life. And amid grief, even amongst the pain, and even deeper in reliving trauma, we may find buried within those giant problems is our purpose.

Within the problem to be overcome we become motivated. There is no life without motivation. Life is movement. If it wasn’t for the problem we would lounge around all day. Within the problem is nested an opportunity. Very few people are genuine self-starters. And most self-starters are not born that way.

Your problems now are very relevant. They may have come about through evils done to you. They may have traumatised you. You may have been left shattered. But this isn’t to say you can’t recover from these adversities, to then use that wealth of painful life experience to right the plan of your life, even as you inspire others to do the same thing.

Realistically, we all need hope that we
can turn adversity into some sort of triumph.

You are writing your story, and you are writing it in live time, which is to say that today, even this moment as you breathe and consider these words, you write history. YOU!

Today doesn’t write itself. You have the pen in your hand and the keyboard at your fingertips. The circumstances will be as they will be. Of the things that you cannot change, there are so many ways to respond that are as if you are writing a different ending. All it takes is the belief of self to say, “No, it won’t be finishing the way you think it will. You’ll see!”