Problems: Square Peg in Round Hole

If you are like me, you see value in troubles and difficult situations in life.  You understand that you can become a stronger person because of them.  Therefore, when you are in the midst of difficulties, you take it with a grain of salt.  

Call me crazy, but I can honestly say that I don’t remember the last time I had a bad day.  I don’t have bad days.  I DO have some days that are more stressful than others.  Also, I’ve come to realize that there is more good that happens in my life than bad.  Everyone had bad days and good days.  Good and bad visit everyone.  When something bad happens, if figure it is just my turn.  Good will come soon enough.  

Still, sometimes bad things seem to linger.  They hang around a lot longer than normal.  When this happens, I use past experience to try to get me through.  I look back at circumstances I have already lived through to try to ease my way through the present tunnel.  

I’m learning that sometimes, knowledge based on your life history does little in some situations.  You will have to have a paradigm shift in your thoughts, emotions, learning, and maybe even way of life.  

I think a good example of what I mean is childbirth.  Of course, my experience comes as an observer.  Childbirth is a wonderful experience.  After watching the birth of my first child, I called my family to tell them the news.  During a conversation with my sister, she said to me, “Wasn’t that an event unlike any other you have experienced?”  Truly, it is.  

Now I do not wish to speak for women, but I think this is a good parallel to what I mean.  You can do all the studying, take all the classes, and prepare all your life, but you still are not prepared for the actual event of giving birth.  I mean from the mother’s point of view.  We men can still be left feeling unprepared and awe struck.  Multiply that by one thousand and we may begin to understand the mother’s perspective.  Once the child is born, there is a complete shift in life.  Nothing about your life will ever be the same.

Many years ago, I was faced with the possibility that my basis for living was wrong.  I don’t mean occasional doubts that creep into our minds and cause us to wonder.  I was looking into the eyes of the monster called Doubt.  I was facing the fact that this doubt was real and not what I previously believed.  If my belief system was wrong, where do I place my hope?  I was lost.  For the first time in my life I knew what it meant to be lost with no hope of survival.  I knew no one would be looking for me.  

What saved me is that I learned my belief system was right, but not in the way that I thought it was right.  Because of a shift in my faith and my way of thinking, my beliefs are stronger now than ever.  I’ve heard it said that a mind that has been enlarged by an experience can never shrink back to its formal size.

I was trying to fit the square peg of my past experience into the hole of my present reality.  Needless to say, it didn’t fit.  So it is with some circumstances in life.  God is prodding us to open our minds, our lives to His molding.  Once we shed the last part of the cocoon that entangles us, we will see with new eyes.  We have to get a new round peg for the new round whole in our lives.  The old square one no longer fits.  Based on an earlier statement, maybe we just graduated to a larger hole.  “There’s a God shaped hole in all of us.”