My Inbox of Daily Inspirations: Daily Heartlight -- November 1, 2007

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November 1, 2007

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=========================== TODAY'S ARTICLE ==========================

The Means to Growth, by Rubel Shelly

Most of us have areas of life in which we need to grow. We need more
patience. We want greater self-discipline. We long to strengthen our
families, contribute to our friends, and make a difference.

Then come the setbacks. She doesn't get the educational opportunities
she had dreamed of and sought. He is seriously hurt in a car wreck. A
business fails. There is a chronic illness. Some terrible personal
tragedy strikes.

Believe it or not, growth and setbacks seem to be related. All sorts of
studies point to it. Most people who survive great personal trauma
aren't destroyed by it. They survive. They learn. They develop
still-closer personal relationships. They grow from their experience.

Most of us know the term post-traumatic stress, but some experts in the
field of mental health are now using the term post-traumatic growth.
They point to people who emerge from severe life crises feeling
enlarged rather than diminished. They speak of spiritual development,
stronger personal relationships, greater personal strength, deeper
appreciation of life, and clarity about priorities. "We're talking
about a positive change that comes about as a result of the struggle
with something very difficult," Dr. Lawrence Calhoun of the University
of North Carolina said. "It's not just some automatic outcome of a bad
thing." To be sure, some people bring a fuller sense of security in
life to a trauma. They have a better support system. They had already
learned to rely more on God than self.

God made body, mind, and spirit to be marvelously resilient.

I know people who illustrate this phenomenon. A woman who survived a
painful divorce from a cruelly abusive man is doing well in a career
she never planned to have and caring for two children who have been
protected from what she once had to endure. A man who wasn't supposed
to survive widespread cancer seems perfectly healthy seven years after
his diagnosis. A woman who didn't think she could survive her husband's
death is happily married to a man who felt equally devastated at the
loss of his wife two years earlier.

God made body, mind, and spirit to be marvelously resilient. Injury or
illness, divorce or bankruptcy, relocation or cherished person's death
-- each has the capacity to crush or dignify, disorient forever or
reorient to the people and things that matter most. Since God gave us
the capacity to overcome, we are more likely to do so by consciously
seeking him than by fleeing in our confusion.

Tragedy spares no one. God gives grace not only to survive, but also to
grow.

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(c) 2007 Used by permission. From Rubel Shelly's "FAX of Life"
printed each Tuesday. See Faith Matters for previous issues of
the "FAX of Life."

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Daily Heartlight -- November 1, 2007