Challenge or a Season of Growth

Challenge or a Season of Growth: While at the conference in Redding one of the speakers mentioned a dichotomy that he faced, and how it seems to encompass his life of chasing his dream. At first it was just a good saying but now it is clear exactly what he was talking about. He said “the more difficult and challenging something is and the more sacrifice you have to make for your dream to come true; then the more rewarding, fulfilling and valuable it is.” Also as a dear friend and mentor of Paul’s had warned us in the past, that after any great success or “mountain-top” experience, there would come a great challenge and opportunity for growth. (This part is where I-Paul would like to ramble on about research, statistics and the social construct of failure, but I will refrain for the time being. However it is true that we did hit our rough seas and a season of growth after returning from our summer experiences. (Thank you for the heads-up on this one Terry:) It was the let down period that we have all experience in our lives; physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally we were exhausted.

At times of deep growth and challenge there are three common ways that people react: we push through, we fall into a cycle of repetitious attempts to overcome the problem(s) or, we “fail” and rarely if ever try again. We had our times of sleeping in separate rooms, awkward silences, drawn out arguments, bouts of yelling and stomping about, there were tears and fear (but not ‘tears for fears’ an English pop rock duo from in the early 1980s). It is in times like these that the failures, pain and fears from our past can consume our entire lives, distorting everything we look at and causing us to doubt our foundations. But as was mentioned at the begging of this section; the greater the sacrifice, the greater the reward. There is no guarantee of happiness for our faith, there is no promise that we will not endure hardships. As we continue to pursue our passions and dreams we know that we will have to make sacrifices and that it wont all be fun and fancy free; but we look forward with hope that our lives have not and will not be in vain.