Trials draw you closer or make you drift away

We all have trials in our lives.

One time I was personally involved in a real life court trial. Someone did something they shouldn’t have done, charges were brought against them, and I was asked to give my account of what happened. The person against whom charges were brought had a lawyer who knew how to spin a tale, and thus they were let off the hook. But it was quite the scene. Lawyers really do say things like, “Objection, hearsay…”

Judges really do say, “Sustained,” or “Overruled.” Not quite as dramatic as Law and Order, but shows like that capture the essence of a courtroom.

I hope beyond hope that is the only trial in a courtroom I’m ever involved in.

But I’ve had many other trials over the years. Not where one person is accusing another, and a judge or jury is deciding on whether a party is guilty or not. I’ve been accused of things, sometimes fairly, sometimes not and have been found “guilty” in the court of the minds of people immediately surrounding me.

I’ve endured many injustices in my life; but have also been the recipient of some lucky breaks that quite frankly I didn’t deserve or see coming.

The thing about these trials we endure is they have an effect of either drawing you close to your goal or drifting away from it – sometimes breaking away from it completely.

But you’ll never be the same coming away from it.

Trials bring clarity to our intentions and our commitments. When Sana and I encountered several lengthy delays while her immigrant visa was processing, we both had a decision to make. Is this going to make or break us? We chose to use the trial to bring us closer together. Now that she has her green card and has been in the U.S. for awhile, we’re going a whole new set of trials. I thought we’d be let off the hook after the drama with the visa, but that’s not how life works. And we have the same decision: to draw close or drift further apart.

That’s just life. Constantly choosing whether to pursue this relationship, that business opportunity. The trials are never fun, but they do bring clarity to our intentions.

Can you imagine a life where everything goes the way we think it should go? Not only would we be spoiled rotten, we’d be soft, lacking resilience. And life would be just plain boring!

Something something we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is the embodiment of our hopes and dreams for all timegoes away like a vapor. It’s disappointing for about five minutes (or five years), but then somehow our emotions magically change for the better. Welcome to being a human being. Sometimes “getting over” that disappointment takes real effort on our part, but at least we know where not to invest our life energy.

It’s easy to get preachy like this typing away on my laptop; but I speak from real experience, even while enduring trials that are ongoing in real time. If you read this in 2028, 5 years after I write this, the current trial will be over, and we’ll be enduring others.

One thing is for certain: the trials will never stop. Once you get through one, there’s another waiting in the wings. Sometimes the next trial doesn’t wait for you to finish the current one; it just announces itself and you’ve got to deal with it the best you know how.