Tough times...

It's easy to ask, "Why did this happen?" or worse "Why does this keep happening?".

It's easy to get mad. Blame others, blame God maybe. Whether it's a big tragedy or a ton of little problems that add up and hit you like 12 gauge buckshot often times the easiest thing to do is play the victim and point fingers when maybe what we should be doing is learning about ourselves and looking internally.

Have you ever learned anything about yourself on a perfectly sunny day? For me these days are blue-bird ski days, with no traffic or lift lines - usually found in Aspen-Snowmass (shh, don't tell). Awesome Saturdays with my wife riding bikes around to breweries in Fort Collins, or going home for holidays and not worrying about anything, literally, you can sit on the couch and read, fully focused on turning pages not really caring about anything else.  Nope, I have never learned anything about myself on those days...except maybe that I like them a lot and wish there were more days like that.

The truth is we need tough times, dark times, rough times, to shape us into who we are. Whether it's losing friends, marriage problems, money problems, job issues or just being stuck out in the woods without a compass these things cause us learn what's below the surface of ourselves. Sometimes that makes those tough times even harder to deal with because we don't like what comes out. To be honest, I wouldn't change anything about the worst times in my life because of how much stronger and wiser I am today because of it.

There's this book called The Journey of Desire written by a Christian climber from Boulder, CO that opened my eyes to a new thought. Basically this whole life is shaping us for who we're meant to be in the eternal lives ahead of us. We're these rough blocks of wood being shaped by the gritty sandpaper of the world. Question is are you going to just let yourself get all scratched up, scarred and haggard or are you going to learn from these tough times and be shaped into who you were meant to be - something incredibly unique and beautiful.