Have you had those moments when everything seems to be going wrong, and you feel like you can never catch a break? You wake up in the morning and the default mindset is that something would go wrong, and you are almost afraid to enjoy beautiful moments because you are sure they wouldn’t last. I hear you!

What if you find a way to turn your pain into purpose? I often would quip, “God, whatever the lesson is please let me learn it fast so I can get a break from these painful moments”. However, when things begin to lighten up, I find myself almost afraid to enjoy them because of fear of when the next “shoe” would drop.

I then began to shift my thinking a little bit to “what if there’s a purpose to all this? Suppose this is a character-building moment? What character trait do I need to develop?  What if there is someone that my pain may benefit? One thing that those character-building moments do is that they can help you to feel and understand more deeply what others might be going through.  Often, they help you gain the ability to empathize with the people you are serving. They also tend to build our confidence level when we rise above them.  Sometimes that happens even while you are dealing with your pain, and can remove yourself for a moment from it, to say to someone else, “I hear you.” Most often, at that point, you really do because you are more inclined to listen more deeply.

Pain is not a default, so we need to get our minds out of the loop of defaulting to fearing the worst. We need to adopt the mindset that pain will not last and might have a purpose. The default should be to find out how we can turn our pain to our purpose.

Comment below: What are your character-building moments which you turned to purpose or are turning to purpose?  What are those moments when you have “turned a sword to a walking stick”, so to speak?