Forged by Fire

The other day, my daughter and I were talking about a friend of hers who is going through difficult times. She was distraught over the pain and sorrow he was experiencing … it reminded her of her own grief when her father died just as she began her first year of college.

This led to a discussion of how the sorrow of her dad’s death has served her – how it has shaped her into a stronger, more sensitive, and more compassionate person. She is now much more aware of other people’s pain and she has a strong sense of how to handle difficult situations, how to be of comfort to others without being a burden.

My own childhood was a difficult one filled with disappoints and challenges. Those set-backs molded me into a strong person who perceives challenges as opportunities to try new approaches and to test new skills.

In both cases, my daughter and I had a choice: we could become victims to our situations or we could face them, as painful as they were, and learn from them – grow from them. My daughter could have taken a semester off from college and come home to the comfort and assurance of me and our home. But, instead, she bravely continued going to classes and faced the discomfort and unease of her classmates who didn’t know how to handle her and often ignored her because of this. In my case, I could have given up when the first challenge presented itself, rather than persevering and finding ways to overcome it.

Because of the choices we made – to confront pain instead of run from it – both of us have been shaped by our difficulties … as I put it when we talked, we have been forged by fire.

No one would wish difficult situations upon ourselves; but, when they do arise, we have the opportunity to both demonstrate and develop our characters, to shape ourselves into better people.

Questions to ponder: What difficulties are we facing today? How do we “run away” from them? And how can we, instead, confront those difficulties, use our character to deal with them, and allow these “fires” to “forge” us into becoming even better?