When life hands you lemons, use them for their nutritional qualities--whatever they are... I'm not a doctor.

I don't know about you, but when bad crap happens to me I tend to just freak out. There isn't a whole lot of introspection going on at the moment of bad crap arrival. Which betrays a pretty telling thing about my viewpoint on life: I generally assume that obstacles or difficulties in life should be avoided at all cost. I used to think it was near impossible to argue with such a statement, until I read an argument against it... and it was a good one.

Our good friend Epictetus thinks that such a view is downright silly. In his treatise entitled, "Concerning Divine Providence," Epictetus asks his audience why they complain when bad things happen to them. Most of us probably would think it's fairly obvious why we complain when bad things happen to us, but apparently it's not. Epictetus contends that bad things are essentially the only things that make us better. Without all those difficult circumstances and trying times, we would have nothing to show for our progress in this life. We would be static. He utilizes an example to prove his point that would have been particularly relevant to his Greek-speaking audience: Heracles. Now, to us in the West, that would be Hercules. Hercules was known for accomplishing a great deal of "feats" in Greek mythology (we probably all read about them in middle school at some point), including killing a particularly nasty lion, an ugly snake-like creature with numerous heads called a hydra, capturing a fleet-footed deer, and a frightening, feisty boar. You may remember this. Epictetus asks the question: What if that lion never existed? What if the hydra wasn't available to fight? What if that deer was fat and slow? OK, well, he didn't really ask that last question but he would have if he had thought about how funny yet relevant to his argument it would be. If Hercules never went through those hardships, what would he have become? Certainly not a hero. He would have been just one more slob, sitting on his rock or whatever they used for couches back then, doing whatever they did before the NFL monopolized the attention-spans of all adult males in the western hemisphere of the earth.

Epictetus says, Look, God gave you all these abilities and faculties with which you can overcome hardship and become stronger having done so. Why waste that? Why avoid those difficult times and obstacles? Don't you know that God provides even them for you to use for your benefit? Once again, the author of the Epistle of James in our New Testaments says essentially the same thing (I pointed out the similarities between the Epistle of James and its contemporary philosophers like Epictetus in a previous post). James writes in 1:2-4: "Consider it to be completely joyous, my brothers, whenever you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Let endurance have its complete effect, in order that you might be complete and whole, lacking in nothing." James goes on to remind his audience that God is the giver of all good things, which in this context seems to even include these so-called "trials."

Now, it is worth pointing out that tragedy seems to be something different than "trials." I do not think that the death of a loved one is what God ever wants--in fact, if the Bible is true God never actually wants death for anyone, not even his enemies (cf. Ezekiel 18:32)! What seems to be more in view here for each author are the more mundane disturbances that we all experience on a more or less weekly basis in our lives. Like your car breaking down, or that new co-worker who is rude and annoying, or that neighbor who insists on making his ice sculptures with a chainsaw every Saturday morning starting around 5:00am. You get the picture. These are all potential opportunities for advancement, as they say in the business world (at least, that's what I hear they say--I work for a church).

We do not get to choose whether or not these things happen to us, but we do get to choose how we react to these things. We can choose to worry. We can choose to whine and complain. We can choose to act like it's not even happening. But none of those decisions will accomplish anything. If we choose to use these hardships for our own personal growth... well then, now we're speaking Epictetus' language.

Most of us try to secure the Good Life for ourselves by doing everything in our power (which is not much) to avoid obstacles and challenges. We think that the Good Life is one that lacks all hardship. But according to Epictetus and the authors of the Bible, that's not exactly true. In fact, it is completely false. The things most of us spend our time worrying about and fruitlessly trying to avoid are the very things that give us the potential to improve. Living the Good Life means recognizing that we can't control events, we can merely control our response to those events, and thus we can utilize whatever happens to us to benefit our own personal growth and development. For the Christian, this means we use those hardships to form ourselves into God's own likeness, so that we can experience that much more of what the Kingdom of God has to offer, both now and forever.