Pondered Thoughts - A Series: Part 1 - How Adversity Shapes Us

As I have been doing Sunday School lesson series on my Sacramental Present Truths page, I wanted to maybe begin a series of introspection on various aspects of my own worldview as analyzed and honestly stated, something I have had some trouble doing over the years as expressing one's honest thoughts is not an easy task.   A number of things inspired this over the past several weeks, including having to sit for long periods (three to four hours) after my workday was over in the company cafeteria waiting for my wife to pick me up on her way home from her job.  Sitting there, I was able to spend a lot of time writing, and it more or less motivated me to talk about some things I normally would not address, but was able to lucidly write about extensively in my personal journal.  I figured that experience was as good of a place to start regarding these reflections, so we'll go with it.

Over the years, I have had to be put in some odd positions, including long periods of waiting in offices, at bus stations, and in lobbies of hotels and restaurants due to divergent work schedules that Barbara and I have had to manage with one vehicle.  Often I let her take the car, and what that sometimes means is either getting to my office way early or staying way late, long after my work shift is over.  At other times, it meant waiting in restrooms, or sitting for hours on a bus in order to ride hours to get home on a bus, or it meant being at weird places at weird times.  Often, while I am waiting around, I take the opportunity to write in my personal journal I have been keeping consistently for about 20 years, and despite the circumstance I am thrust into, I often get some of my best insights from those circumstances as I am sitting and writing, waiting and watching.  You observe a lot, and at times working observations into my thoughts yields some interesting perspective.   I want to share some of those moments here at this point, and there is an important lesson - Dolly Parton once said that when life hands you cow patties, you grow a garden.  Well, a lot of rich, stinky manure produced bountiful fruit in my case, and looking back on it, there were valuable lessons to be learned in such situations.  Now, mind you, I hate those types of situations, but again to use another analogy, I have learned to take the lemons and make a good lemonade out of them.  Now, I want to serve you some of the lemonade!  So, enjoy the bounty of my "garden of thought," and hopefully you will appreciate how much manure produced it!

I am currently looking at a fairly recent entry I penned on February 25th of this year, as some good insight began to be shared at this point.  At that time I was pondering some stuff I was dealing with, and the one realization that hit me was that I needed to learn to take a more balanced approach to my own particular "story" - the good should be preserved as best as it can be, and the bad should be seen in lieu of the good.  The resulting fruit of doing this would be to come away from a given situation of any sort with more self-awareness and a motivation to let the real me begin to blossom as God intended while at the same time thinking of how this experience would be used to benefit someone else.  Negative things in one's past are a given, and they are inescapable.  The issue is not if one has negative situations or adversity, but rather how one handles them.  Take the manure analogy for instance - manure will not do much good except make you stink if you allow it to bury you, but if you can manage to make something useful of it by letting it nourish the soil of your imagination, it will bear abundant fruit.  It is important to note here that "manure" is metaphorically speaking of life's adversities, and not the falsehoods and "Walter Mitty Syndromes" some people like to construct around themselves.  A Pentecostal televangelist once said that "your present position doesn't determine your future potential," and he was right.  It doesn't mean that you become blissfully unaware of it in some quasi-gnostic fashion, but rather taking the adversity and using it as a growth tool.  At times it is hard to do in certain situations when you are in them, because it is so easy for any of us to focus on the present situation, but we need to grow beyond that.  I want to now use a story from classic literature I am fond of to illustrate the point.

Prince Giglio meets the Fairy Blackstick on a coach, from "The Rose and the Ring"

In 1855, the British writer William Makepeace Thackaray wrote an amusing little story called The Rose and the Ring which I became acquainted with when I was a kid myself.  My mother had bought me, when I was just a baby, a set of story books compiled in 1925 by an educator named Olive Beaupre Miller entitled My Book House, and excerpts from Thackaray's book were included in one of the volumes.  Although a humorous story, it had a great moral to it.  The story centers around the lives of four young monarchs in two fictional kingdoms, and two of them - Princes Giglio and Bulbo - were given by their mothers an enchanted ring and rose respectively that rendered anyone who possessed them desireable to the opposite sex.  However, Giglio, along with the Princess Rosalba, also received something else from an enigmatic personage called the Fairy Blackstick (who also gifted the two queen mothers with the rose and ring too) when at their christenings the Fairy called upon them and gave them the gift of "a little misfortune."  As it ended up, Giglio's and Rosalba's fathers, who were both kings of their respective nations, were overthrown and the two youngsters were greatly diminished in their upbringing - Giglio's father was succeeded by his ambitious uncle, Valoroso XXIV, and Rosalba's father was overthrown by a rebellious vassal by the name of Padella, who was Bulbo's father.  When Padella overthrew Rosalba's family, she was very young and ended up getting lost in the woods where some lions raised her, while Giglio ended up being totally neglected in the palace and almost disowned by his contemptous uncle.   However, when it all came to a head and both of them ended up in trouble, the Fairy showed them what that "little misfortune" taught them, and in the end they became the rulers of their kingdoms as well as being married to each other.  On page 113 of the story, when Giglio and Rosalba are reunited and the Fairy pays a visit to them, she said the following to them about the circumstance: "Bless you, my darling children!  Now you are united and happy, and now you see what I said from the first, that a little misfortune has done you both good.  You, Giglio, had you been bred in prosperity, would scarcely have learned to read or write - you would have been idle and extravagant, and could not have been a good king as you now will be.  You, Rosalba, would have been so flattered, that your little head might have been like Angelica's, who thought herself too good for Giglio." (William Makepeace Thackaray, The Rose and the Ring.  London:  Smith, Elder, and Co., 1902.  p. 113).   When I read that, I think to myself, "what would I have turned out like, had circumstances been different - better or worse?"   Many who know me and my story know I grew up very poor for most of my childhood from about age 9 onward, and it was not an easy way to grow up.  I had to learn early about how to creatively deal with adversity - my application of an Appalachian trait of  "makin' do" - and the way I did so was to educate myself.  I read a lot when I was a kid, being in a small town in West Virginia where you have little money and not much else to do I found a lot of solace in reading a wide diversity of material at an early age.  Some of my elementary school classmates I still keep in touch with have an amusing memory of my fifth-grade year when I read the whole set of World Book Encyclopedias through at least three times.  Reading books was a sort of escape from the rather grim surroundings I had to grow up in, and a lot of what I read then actually inspired me, gave me a lot of clarity, and fueled an active imagination - I wanted to apply what I was reading in an active, practical way, and you would not believe some of the experiments I got into!  I think too that is one reason why I have always liked that one movie Matilda that graced the cinema several years back - I watch that movie, and I see a female version of myself in that little girl (who was well-played by child actor Mara Wilson).  If you recall the movie, Matilda faced a lot of adversity - she had two deadbeat parents (Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman played those roles well too), a school with a butchlike headmistress who despised children and only wanted to set up her own little despotic kingdom in order to satisfy her own insecurity, and on top of all that her dad was into illegal activity and was under surveillance by the authorities.  But, young Matilda discovered the joy of reading, and it changed her life, and like the fictional Rosalba in The Rose and the Ring, a "little misfortune" cultivated character and motivation in little Matilda too.  I was a lot like that when I was around the same age - I never got to know my father, and my mother was often so immature that her idea of life was to sit around passing gas, drinking beer, and listening to depressing honky-tonk records (we also didn't have a TV when I was a kid either - in a way that is not such a bad thing though!).  So, I had to mature earlier than I probably should have then, as we went through a lot of diversity where we lived at the time and my only escape was in reading as well as in time listening to Henry Boggen play vintage big band records on WBT-AM out of Charlotte, NC.  However, I also had some other help then too, although I didn't fully appreciate it at the time.  My fifth and sixth-grade teacher was a large jar-headed man with the demeanor of a Marine drill sergeant by the name of Guy Dispanet Jr., and although initially I hated him, in time he brought my potential out of me and after three years with him in the classroom - he flunked my butt in the first year, so I had to repeat fifth grade, but it was good for me - I gained his respect, and in turn I came to really respect him as a teacher, as he ended up being one of the best I ever had.  God used Dispanet to give me the swift kick in the keister I needed to begin to develop my potential, and it paid off richly in later years.  Although much of this was there before I even encountered Guy Dispanet in that small classroom in Kirby, WV, in 1980, I credit him with guiding me to channel the assets I possessed in such a way that it made me shine like I was intended to.  Although he passed away in 1993, I still have a special place for Dispanet in my thoughts, and I owe him a great deal for helping me to be formed and shaped in such a way that I could begin to reach the potential I had.  Thank God for good teachers, which these days are a rare commodity.  If you had them, and they are still with us, please reach out to them as they can use the encouragement of knowing they helped shape someone's life.

Adversity is never pleasant when you face it, but in the adverse circumstance there is a lesson to be learned that will make it count for something later.  Do you remember, for instance, Genesis 3:17?   Adam and Eve had really screwed up, but they refused to own it - people who read that account in Genesis 3 often focus on taking the bite out of the fruit as the mortal sin, but that really was not it - Adam's sin was self-justification, for instead of having the stamina to take ownership for what he did and petitioning God's mercy, Adam instead chose to attempt to explain his way out by "passing the buck" first on Eve, and later on God Himself (read this later on Sacramental Present Truths, as it is part of a recent Sunday School lesson).  So, in verse 17, God handed down sentence to Adam, and part of that was that God cursed the ground for Adam's sake.  Like the Fairy Blackstick in The Rose and the Ring, God "cursed" the ground for the purpose of building in Adam character through his adverse condition of all that backbreaking labor he was going to have to do just to survive, and ironically God was telling Adam this - if he does labor, then the fruit of the labor will be more satisfying, so instead of a "curse" work would actually be good for him!   So, although adversity is unpleasant, it actually may be to our advantage to go through it when we do because it grows us, much like stinky manure grows beautiful roses and delicious tomatoes.   The problem with adversity though is that often we don't see how it is good when we are experiencing it, and often it is only in hindsight that we can say "aha!" to the whole situation.  But, that's fine too - at least we got the message, albeit late!   But, it doesn't have to be totally that way, because in adversity it is important to stay focused on the bigger picture, and if you can do that, then you will be surprised at what will result from it.

There is much more - oh so much more, as I had three hours to write journal entries on this subject! - that could be said, but the bottom line is actually quite simple.  Adversity builds character in that it challenges us to use a negative circumstance to a positive advantage, and in doing so we see for ourselves what we are made of.  If everything were all "lollypops and rainbows," we would never be challenged to stretch ourselves, and thus a lot of things we could do would never even be thought of.  As a concluding thought, I think also of Jacobo Timerman, the Russian-born Argentine journalist who was imprisoned by the Peronist regime in the late 1970's for speaking out against atrocities.  Timerman wrote a great book about his experiences called Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, that was originally published in 1980.  I first became familiar with the book when I was ten years old, during one of those long, poverty-stricken summers in Kirby, WV, where mostly all I had to do then at times was read many times over several past issues of various magazines that people gave us, and one of those was an issue of Reader's Digest that had an excerpt from this book of Timerman's in it.  As I eventually got the book and read it more thoroughly, something struck me about what he said on page 36 - "Memory is the chief enemy of the solitary tortured man - nothing is more dangerous at such moments.  But, I managed to develop certain passivity-inducing devices for withstanding torture and anti-memory devices for those long hours in the solitary cell."  (Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. p. 36).   Timerman was an agnostic unfortunately, and unlike others who were unjustly imprisoned such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he unfortunately didn't know how to use adversity to his advantage in this case - far from being the enemy of the  "solitary tortured man," the memory at times may be the very thing that maintains sanity in adversity.  Our memories, both good and bad, can be a great classroom for us if we allow them to be so, and having the time to reflect on them can help one make some sense out of a situation and instill a resolve to overcome it.   Growing up as I did - and unfortunately I don't have the liberty to share that entire story for a variety of reasons at this time - I valued memory and imagination, and it was something I believe God used to develop what He gave me personally.   As G.K. Chesterton remarked in his various writings, humans were created by God as both creatures and creators, and as such it is the poetic, or imaginative, view of existence that keeps a person sane (Thomas Peters, The Christian Imagination - G.K. Chesterton on the Arts.  San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2000. p. 44).  If it hadn't been for an insatiable desire to read and learn, I would have been just another Appalachian statistic rather than being able to rise above circumstance and go after what I felt God called me to do.  Timerman fails to admit it, but in reality something drove him to maintain sanity in that dank Argentine prison, and thankfully for his sake it did!  

So, as I now conclude this discourse, my advice to anyone facing adversity is to do several things.  First, utilize the adverse situation as a learning experience, and if you are a God-fearing person, you need to ask Him "what is it I am supposed to come out of this with?"  An applicable verse in that instance is Romans 8:28 - God orders all things for our good, in essence.  Second, it is important to maintain focus on the greater picture - if you have a job or a hobby, school, or anything else, don't let the adversity derail you, but rather focus more on the task and excel.  You may actually surprise yourself if you do!  Third, adversity is a good condition to begin writing - write down anything that comes to mind in a journal preferably, and as you do so, it helps sort a lot out that may be going on in your mind due to the situation you are facing.  If you take those three steps, you will not only learn about yourself, but you will also discover that you may have more strength than you give yourself credit for.  It is also important to remember that adversity is not a question of if but rather of when - no one is immune from life's crapstorms, and at some point one will inevitably blow through your life.   Rather than letting it blow you away though, it is important to root yourself, and I cannot think of any better way than prayer and a consistant religious faith to do so - and, don't do it alone; pray with your husband or wife too, because adversity may be something you are facing together and you need each other too.  If you do that, not only will you be strengthened, but also your religious conviction, your marriage, and even your knowledge will be strengthened as well.  Hopefully this insight will help someone, and I have more to share on another subject next time.