A few weeks ago, my oldest brother completed a grueling series of chemo-therapy treatments, including stem cell therapy. It lasted for months and months, and required him and his wife to live at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Tx. It seemed like they were there forever. It’s easy for me to write those words while I’m sitting comfortably at my desk, on the outside looking in, insulated from that misery, not having had to endure the pain, fear, and sense of loss he felt. It was unbelievably challenging for them. But he is surviving. At the end of the ordeal, he told me he was reminded that “life is difficult.”
He was referring to a quote in the book written in 1978 by M. Scott Peck entitled, The Road Less Traveled. The road less traveled is taking the road of maintaining loving relationships, even in the midst of difficult circumstances. The opening sentence in the book is, “Life is difficult.”
It became a classic, selling more than 7 million copies, partly because it challenged people to take the road less traveled, not to settle for mediocrity and misery.
The fact that life does at times stink, shouldn’t lead us to despair, Peck argued. The delusion that life should be fair, that things should predominately land in our favor, will only lead us to disappointment. But recognizing that that life is inherently difficult can actually spur us to assemble the tools we need to thrive. Those tools involve self-discipline, which itself is not easy.
Of course, what makes discipline difficult is that it’s daily. I’ve heard that the most difficult thing about being a milk farmer is that the cows have to be milked every day.
Doing those daily things that aren’t that much fun can discolor out attitude, wearing us down to the point where we flag and let up, then, when a crisis lands, we aren’t ready and collapse.
We’ve all seen how the Coronavirus has caused a major upheaval in our lives. It’s not easy to stay steady, calm and directed in such times. For some, it’s the end of the world, while others are negotiating through.
When life steers us along a steady course, we’re good, but life is difficult. It’s easy to be disciplined when life is as calm as a float trip down Green River on a sunny, spring day. But, rapids can suddenly appear, and the more prepared we are, the better able we are to navigate through them.
We’ve seen people who have let life beat them down. They’ve gotten burned by someone or something somewhere back there, and in their resentment, they retreated, more or less, into themselves, settling for mediocrity and even misery.
But how does it happen that some thrive? It’s a choice we make to think the right thoughts that result in healthy actions.
You become what you think about most of the time. Negative thoughts produce negative emotions, and thus negative people.
So, what am I to be thinking? I’m going to be thinking something, so where should I direct my thoughts?
When my gasoline tank registers empty, I know it’s full—full of air, that is. But my automobile is not designed to run on air. To displace the air, I fill it with gasoline. God’s cure for wrong thinking is to fill our minds with the good. Our minds are then transformed. “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise”(Philippians 4:8), wrote the Apostle Paul, who had his share of difficult days.
For me it all begins before I even get out of bed, with asking God to direct my thinking.
I will admit, that isn’t always easy, but it’s a daily discipline that sets the sail for my day.
And then, lo and behold, on one of those sad and lonely days that seems to stretch on forever, I’ll see a smile on a child’s face, or someone will say, “Thank you,” and really mean it, or the sun will break through the clouds on my way home from work, and though I can’t deny that life is difficult, it can be mighty good, too.