Grateful For The Challenges
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It’s been said that better questions lead us naturally to better answers, and that it’s in not knowing that we open the doorway to knowing. I’m Scott Lennox and you’re listening to The Beautiful Question, a consideration of things that truly matter in a complex world.
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Like pearls formed by the irritation of a grain of sand in an oyster, life’s challenges can grow precious things in us when we allow it.
Join me this week as we consider ways of bringing those good things into the foreground of our awareness. Stay with me.
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Photo: Team One
Briefer than most, this week’s episode allows us the opportunity to look at some of the ways we’ve struggled and the good that came from those struggles. As I do from time to time to illustrate the point, I’ll share an entry from one of my journals.
Today, I’m grateful for the hardest challenges I’ve had to face as well as innumerable small ones. Taken in sum, they served to strengthen and reshape me, giving me a deeper sense of purpose and clarity and a focus I would have gained in no other way. Walking through them made me wiser, more accepting, more compassionate, and much more present. Because of them, I’ve grown increasingly passionate about living well, one day at a time, and about helping other people do the same thing.
The challenges helped awaken me as a human being, inspiring me to fully commit to living in the moment. They taught me how to be patient and how to truly listen, inside and outside. They caused me to treasure the seemingly small things in my life as well as the grand ones. They showed me some of my vulnerabilities and many of my strengths. They showed me how to love and be loved.
In that face of all that, how could I be anything but grateful?
(from the author’s daily journal)
Among the many reasons I offer these weekly podcasts, one stands out in particular. I want to make further good out of all that I have lived—to create something meaningful and beautiful and useful out of what I’ve experienced and endured, as well as the things I’ve enjoyed.
Another is to reach out and embrace you and your life, whoever and wherever you are and whatever you’re going through. My hope is to remind each of us, again and again, that our struggles don’t define us and needn’t restrict us or compress our lives.
After all, we were born to live richly and expansively.
Aware of that, I refuse to think of myself as “a survivor” of this trauma or that, even though I did, in fact, survive them all. I’m not what happened to me. I’m not a label or a category or a diagnosis or a statistical sample. I’m a human being who is alive today. I’m living a life that has included many hard and painful things, yet even more wonderful and miraculous ones. I’m someone who celebrates the fact that I continue to experience the blessing and the grace of extraordinary people and extraordinary events and extraordinary personal gifts.
In fact, when I consider the sum of my life, the balance tips so strongly and resoundingly toward the good that I’m humbled by how blessed I am, even in the midst of massive global changes and more unknowns ahead of us than any of us can fully name.
Because of all that, and some things I’ll forever keep to myself, I’m grateful for every challenge that helped get me where I am today—every single one of them.
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This week’s Beautiful Questions are offered as a window into our exploration of where we’ve been and what good came of it.
Question One: In what powerful ways have you been challenged in your lifetime?
Question Two: What gifts or blessings or positive changes grew out of those challenges?
Question Three: In what ways will you allow yourself to remember and express your gratitude for the things you’ve survived?
As always, I welcome your responses. I look forward to celebrating with you.
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As I say each week,
My Light with Your Light!
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Thank you for joining me in these podcasts as we keep doing the things we can to respond to life in increasingly effective ways. As always, I’m open to your comments and feedback.
You can be further inspired by visiting my friends at Kosmos Journal. That’s K O S M O S Journal. Their mission is to inform, inspire, and engage global transformation in harmony with all life. You can easily find them online at Kosmos Journal dot O R G.
And at thebeautifulquestion.com, you can read the illustrated transcript of each podcast as you listen. You’ll also find an archive of all previous podcasts, including episodes three and four, guided relaxation audios that can help you practice letting go on a daily basis.
If you find these podcasts useful, don’t hesitate to share them or tell others about them. That’s a great way of helping me get a voice of calm and collaboration and balance and encouragement out into the world.
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I’m Scott Lennox, and this has been The Beautiful Question.
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The Beautiful Question is a One Light production, written, produced, and engineered by Scott Lennox at HeartRock Studios in Fort Worth, Texas, as a way of paying forward to life, being fully present, becoming better engaged with things that truly matter in a complex world, and committing to a healthier future for all of us.