A Familiar Road

“But if you pray to God and seek the favor of the Almighty, and if you are pure and live with integrity, he will surely rise up and restore your happy home. And though you started with little, you will end with much. Just ask the previous generation. Pay attention to the experience of our ancestors. For we were born but yesterday and know nothing. Our days on earth are as fleeting as a shadow. But those who came before us will teach you. They will teach you the wisdom of old.” Job 8:5-10

How many times have you heard the quote “if you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat it.”? The world has felt a little like that lately. When I think about the global pandemic we’re facing and how we look at pandemics from centuries ago, Scarlet Fever, the Black Plague, the Spanish Flu… or even when we look at how we handled last year, we have choices to make and things to reference so we can come out of this thing better than we went in it. One of my favorite movies is Outbreak and even though I watch it at least 3 times a year, I found myself watching it more often between February and April of last year, thinking about what we could learn from this fictional story and apply to real life. Of course, the circumstances were much more extreme and we don’t have a Colonel Morgan Freeman to stand up to the evil General and get the vaccine that was developed in 6 hours administered to an entire town of near zombies, but I could pick a few things from the story that I would like to have seen us take more seriously than we did (that quarantine was keeping folks alive!). Either way, knowing what others went through and how they survived gives us more than just a hope of survival, it gives us, at the least, a blueprint.

Life gets like that in our personal situations as well. Every hiccup we encounter seems like the worst thing that ever happened… until we think about someone else that it happened to before. And that is where the silver lining of Satisfaction comes in when the Sadness of our situation comes about. I know for me, when I’m going through the worst of it what keeps me going is thinking about the stories of my own past and the testimonies of others. Another saying that comes to mind right now is “there’s nothing new under the sun” and that’s true, too! We are not the originators of the things that happen on our bad days and if we think long enough to see past ourselves we can recall somebody we know, or saw on tv, or read about, who experienced a similar situation. And that doesn’t mean their story is the same as yours or that your life will pan out like theirs did, but some of your chapters might look a little like theirs and there are lessons to be learned there.

As a therapist, there are a lot of things we rely on when preparing to treat new clients. Of course there are years of schooling, and then there’s years of practice. And while we’re doing that we’re looking at things that happened with other people and things that worked and didn’t work when treating them. We don’t normally sit around and magically manifest new ideas that haven’t been tried somewhere with someone before. And even when we do find something new, we test it out and give it trial and error until we’re sure someone can benefit from it. But I say that to say, we rely on what we have learned about other experiences and responses to emotions and situations to help you with yours… We rely on the past and history to make the present more livable. But how do you do that? As always, I’m an advocate for therapy and getting the help you need. But when I’m dealing with situations that may not need as much direct care or are in the immediate moments, here are three key affirmations I use:

The first one is that God’s got me. I remind myself that I have so much going for me that He gave me and if He didn’t intend for me to have it, why would He give it? Now you may want to bring up Job (you know, since I’ve been talking about him all month) but even in Job’s story, everything God took from him, He returned even greater. So if God gave it and takes it away, that only means better is coming. Affirmation two: We’ve been here, and made it through this, before. This is all FAMILIAR! We have success and failure, happiness and sadness, good times and bad times all in this same life we live. So that means this storm is going to pass just as sure as a rainbow is going to come. And affirmation three: if they can get through it, so can I. Job was actually advised that same thing:

“But if you pray to God and seek the favor of the Almighty, and if you are pure and live with integrity, he will surely rise up and restore your happy home. And though you started with little, you will end with much. Just ask the previous generation. Pay attention to the experience of our ancestors. For we were born but yesterday and know nothing. Our days on earth are as fleeting as a shadow. But those who came before us will teach you. They will teach you the wisdom of old.” (Job 8:5-10)

Job was encouraged to see the suffering of the generations before and how they were able to overcome. We can find Satisfaction through our saddened situation by remembering that If He brought out one group, He can/will bring out another. And when you find that Satisfaction, it makes it much easier to sleep at night. So be encouraged! Remember that you are loved, and there’s always somebody out there who understands!