When Everything Goes Wrong...

I have been a victim of this many times. I will have a vision of what I’m going to do this semester or what goal I want to achieve by a certain amount of time. It’s perfect because I even have it lined up in an agenda. There’s no way the plans can fail.

Wrong. So wrong. It is the times that we think we have it all figured out that it all comes crashing down. We are left frantic and searching for answers because what we thought would happen, didn’t. How do you bounce back from that? How do you recover from hearing you didn’t get the job you centered your whole academic career around? How do you continue on when the answer is no instead of yes?

Here’s what you do. First, you cry. There is this reigning misconception that crying makes you weak or that crying about your problems means that you don't trust God. That is absolutely false to me. Crying is all we want to do when we feel like our world is crumbling. We should it let it all out because it hurts and it’s frustrating. If you don't let go of some emotion in a time in which your life seems to going in a different direction than what you planned, then it may be hard for you to accept that change. It's not impossible, but it will be hard.

But you don't stay in the stage of crying. At some point, you have to recharge. One definition of "recharge" is the replenishment of an aquifer by the absorption of water. After you've cried it all out, you must replenish your aquifer. This step can take the longest because this is where you say "Alright. The plans didn't work, now what?" You have to pivot your direction, plan again to take another shot.

It is only then that you can move on to activate. Once you have let yourself feel all of those emotions and taken time to reboot, now you have to get up and do it again. This is the scariest part because it involves us putting ourselves in the same situation as before.

All in all, when the plans go wrong it's difficult to keep this all in mind. When I come across obstacles in life, I tend to curl into my shell and stay there until it's safe to come out or until I feel that the coast is clear. But I realize that it's not me being a conqueror, that's being a coward. If I proclaim that I am "more than conqueror" (Romans 8:37) then that can't be my strategy. And, it can't be yours. It's okay to cry. It's alright to take time to recharge. And it's important to activate. We have to find a way in this generation to take our struggles and turn them into success.