You got mugged. Lost your brand new latest iPhone model. Cops cant do anything about it.
You didn’t get the salary increase you were hoping for. The explanation to you is that you didn’t quite make it while others who you know are slacking in the job got promoted.
A car scratch. You didn’t know who made that huge line on your car ruining its paint. Now, either you have to be content with that destroyed paint or spend thousands to get it fixed.
Traffic. You are tired and just want to get home but the traffic in the city gets worse everyday. You feel despair with the situation that there is no hope of fixing it.
A person you know in your organization really pisses you off because he or she does not follow what you cascaded and does his or her own thing. You think this person is trying to prove he/she knows more than you and should be followed instead of you.
Headaches you get trying to figure out where to get the money to pay for school tuition, house loan, car loan and credit cards. You are now in a state of avoiding collectors.
Pissed off waiting for your order and complained and shouted at the waiter for making you wait too long when you are hungry. In your mind, you are the customer and paying for the service you deserve.
Then, you just heard your friend has been diagnosed with cancer.
Our lives compared to others
Our daily lives. We complain. We find it hard. We find it difficult. We always wish for something better. We want other things. We want more of other things. And we worry that we do not get the things we want.
But somewhere someone is struggling and battling something worse than what we are going through.
Our friend has been silent for a couple of years save for some messages here and there checking up on each other. Nowhere in those conversations did we heard anything about what was she going through. It was just a typical conversation where laughs and updates were given.
Learning about her predicament surprised us. We didn’t get mad at me for not sharing immediately. It is her story to tell. But knowing it puts life in a bit of a different perspective. That whatever we are going through right now now, may it be difficult for us or leave us in despair, there will always be someone going through something we can not fathom to carry us if it happened to us.
In comparison, our issues become so small and incomparable to others. While you may say that we have our own struggles and comparing is not applicable since we have different lives, it is good to look at our problems as something we can handle. God will never give us something we can’t win. We just have to trust Him.
We should look at our problems in comparison. For example, a stolen phone is just a material thing that while we could be struggling to pay for something we are not going to use anymore, having a terminal illness instead of a lost phone is much more difficult to bear. Waiting for a long time for your order is so trivial compared to having chemotherapy sessions and feeling weak everyday that you can’t do anything about it.
All I am saying is that we all should look at life with a silver lining. There is always light at the end of the tunnel. And even in the darkest hour, there will always be some hint of light somewhere.
And whatever we are going through, may it be trivial or life-threatening, we should always look up to God for guidance as He is faithful. He never let us down.
