When enduring and surviving a traumatic crisis the human person tends to believe that experience has strengthened sufficiently our resolve to make sense of being alive...to become aware of who we are...through the daily process of confronting the fates that attempt to divert us from our chosen course.
A degree of Stoic calm or patience in the face of our adversity would not go amiss, just as an acceptance of life’s fickleness, even a modicum of self detachment, and courageous endurance can carry us some distance during tempestuous times.
Luck has its limits when we recognize that which can enter our life easily, can also exit just as quickly leading the student of life's adversities to wonder why they have been sentenced to such hard lessons, obliged to face realities that appear at first sight to be non-negotiable.
The Stoic response is characterised by maintaining a will in harmony with the natural world – a determined self-control that yields to fate.
Seneca uses metaphor to argue his beliefs:
“An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it… there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it fights against it. The best alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.”
Our trials and tribulations can shock us out of the complacency of false comforts, teaching us difficult lessons about life that need our full attention. More purposefully such crises open us to ourselves without regard for our self protective, incubated images of who we think we are, the result of constructing a mask that we parade to the world concealing our true self.
Our periods of traumatic self examination can offer us the opportunity we did not ask for, to do what we would prefer not to do: examine our lives with a will to understand why we are, where we are....and to come to terms with the person we are today.
Dying to self is never portrayed in Holy Scripture as something optional, rather as an absolute necessity. It is the reality of the new birth; no one can come to Christ unless they are willing to see their old life crucified with Christ leading to new life in the tender, loving care of The Saviour.
Galatians 2
20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
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