When Life is a Gut Punch
Welcome to the Discouragement Zone
You can be walking along feeling good about yourself, your connections with others, your work and hobbies, and all the rest, and all of a sudden, you are flat on your back looking up.
What just happened?
You’re fired!
You failed the test.
You didn’t get the job.
I want a divorce!
The snowball starts to roll . . .
It’s as if something has hijacked your mind and inserted some toxic emotions and thoughts that then sucked all hope out of the air.
Once simple interactions with usually reasonable people become irritants feeding the idea that
nothing is good,
everything is bad,
and nothing will ever change.
Welcome to the Discouragement Zone.
So what to do?
Take a breath and remember you are not alone.
Discouragement (even despair at times) hits us all, even those in denial.
Think of every exciting game in whatever sport you love and you are watching the battle with discouragement.
Your team was winning.
Now they’re losing.
Can they come back?
It’s an opportunity to watch, played out in a few hours, the great struggle of life itself.
Second, we can’t change the discouragement we are experiencing by luxuriating in it.
In the short run tragedies can draw people together.
In the long run, if we choose to live as tragic characters, we will repel those around us who have enough problems of their own.
It may be that God and others we find, even in our darkest moments, will do incredibly loving things for us.
None the less, to overcome discouragement we must face our own problems and make positive liberating choices.
Finally, discouragement is for a season not eternity.
I know it doesn’t feel this way.
Work spiritually with the help of the God of your understanding to break agreements with any voices in your head attempting to discourage you by telling you what a piece of trash (or worse) you are.
I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The LORD will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
Psalms 121 (ESV)
