You’ll never get polished if you can’t stand the rub.
Recently my wife and I were having a discussion with a friend of ours about some of the challenges that we have encountered with her resident visa (which thankfully is finished processing and we’re getting ready to depart Vietnam and relocate to the United States permanently.) We were discussing some of the challenges that have come with the numerous delays that we’ve encountered. We thought something would be done at a certain time and it wasn’t. Then when it seems like finally things are going our way, we hit another roadblock. It was a challenge mentally and emotionally and spiritually to deal with, no question.
This isn’t a “woe is me” sob story. We were just saying it was a challenge and one thing that we discussed was how it is these challenges that make us who we are.
They really build character.
Sometimes I get tired of saying that I’m “building character.”
“I’ve got enough character, thank you very much, and I’m ready to get on with life.”
But that’s not the way life works. We don’t get to choose how much “character” i.e. adversity we’re going to go through. People make decisions that affect us and we just have to live with it. We just have to adjust. It’s natural to get angry in certain situations, but then the anger goes away as it always does, and what do you do? How do you react? How do you respond to these trials?
It’s our response to the trials that define who we are. And we always have a choice. Not necessarily in how much adversity we must endure, but in how we respond to the adversity. You can let it drag you down, make you bitter and ungrateful, think about how unjust the world is and how unjust certain people or certain institutions are.
Or you can think about the good things that you have in your life, in spite of the crazy stuff you’re going through.
What kind of energy are you going to exude through your trials? Is it going to be negative energy or is it going to be positive?
There’s going to be energy regardless. Whether it’s positive or negative energy is up to us.
We have to be able to be willing to endure “the rub”, so to speak. Whenever you’re shining a car or in my case, I like to polish my instruments. The polish always has a very slight abrasive element inside of the polish. That abrasive is taking out the impurities, the dullness in the patina of the paint or the metal.
It’s that very slight irritant in the polish that gets rid of the junk, and then the rest of it can polish up and get to looking the way it’s supposed to. And you can’t just be all nice with the rub; you’ve got to really put some elbow grease in it to get the shine you want.
If it’s just the nice stuff in the polish that brings out the shine, or if you don’t rub hard enough it won’t be effective, because you need to get rid of the impurities first, and then buff that shine.
There are going to be irritants in our lives, but that’s what makes us shine. It’s what makes us ready to face the future challenges. Whether it’s sharing our own challenges with people to encourage them or inspire them to endure their own challenges, or if it’s something else, it really it doesn’t matter.
Bottom line is we all have adversity. Whether or not we allow it to make us better or worse is our decision.