Obstacles Are Blessings
Obstacles are gifts that help us to discover our strengths, live up to our potential and also learn to have compassion for all humanity. Life’s up and downs provide windows of opportunity to determine your values and goals. We should think of using obstacles as stepping stones to building the life we want. If we find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere. Do you know that even the devil himself does not waste his time fighting a cause that is bound to fail, he only fights a cause that is bound for success, so be happy when facing challenges and turn these obstacles to opportunities.
History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to give up. According to Robert H. Schuller, “For every mountain there is a miracle”. Every human being faces one challenge or another daily. If you are going after a goal and things just don’t seem to go your way, don’t give up. Change what needs to be changed and keep going. It is moments like these that really separate the winners and losers in life. Another great quote that inspires me, by Theodore Roosevelt, states,
“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat”
As most people are setting up goals, which are a means to an end, and not the ultimate purpose of our lives, they sometimes forget that these goals are simply a tool to concentrate our focus and move us to a particular direction. The only reason we really pursue goals is to expand and grow. Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term; it’s who we become as we overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve our goals, that will give us the deepest and most long-lasting sense of fulfillment. When faced with any obstacle I am usually humbled because it brings to reality the worthy cause am pursuing and I never forget those passionate people, who lived their dreams, embracing what they love, never giving up. They overcame often seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the path to success in pursuing their vision.
A glaring example is the English novelist John Creasey who got 753 rejection slips before he went ahead and published 564 books. Another good example is Jack Canfield and Mark V. Hansen Book “Chicken Soup for the soul”, however their idea was rejected by 140 book publishers as “unsellable” but today “Chicken Soup for the soul” has sold more than 90 million copies in 39 languages. A truth that we fail to realize is that trials and obstacles are but lessons that we failed to learn, presented once again. So where we made a faulty choice before, we can now make a better one, and thus escape all hindrance that our choices before has brought to us.
I love this quote by Alexander Graham Bell, “When one door closes, another door opens”. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. In reality things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turns out. Martin Luther King. Jr says “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”. For life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze us but to help us discover who we are; for only when we’ve been in the deepest valley can we ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.
In the midst of adversities, to place faith in something other than one’s self requires an element of courage; yet those who have put their trust in God can testify that even greater courage, along with peace of mind is to be found in doing so. Life is not easy for anyone but we must have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing, at whatever cost must be attained. Success is not measured by what we accomplish but by the opposition we have encountered, and the courage with which we have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds so let us take disappointment as cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.
An important twist to obstacles or adversities is the elements behind them, they can be man made or divinely arranged for your good. If man made then remember that these elements operate out of insecurity, believing they have to perfect order to eliminate any threat to their false power. A blessed quote by Les Parvott says “Life would mean so much easier if we didn’t have to deal with men and women who make promises they have no intention of keeping” Many people spend their best energies backstabbing people, trying to become their obstacles, but little do they realize that they are in the real sense setting the stage for their own water loo, for what goes around comes around, the laws of the universe is irrevocable, what a man sows he shall reap.
By Hilda Oti
