You're Trying to Do Everything Right, but Everything's Still Falling Apart. What the...?

We’ve all experienced it. You decide to get out of debt. You turn down the heat, eat Top Ramen for a month, and start buying cheap, generic laundry soap that turns all your whites to gray. And what happens? The washing machine dies and the head gasket blows on your car. It makes no sense! What is God, the Universe, or Kharma trying to tell you? Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem fair. Murphy’s law feels like a very real thing sometimes unfortunately.

One of my daughters recently took a job in San Francisco, California working for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Humanitarian work has been her dream since she was a little girl. She worked in a refugee camp in Greece for a while, assisted a refugee family from the Ivory Coast in Salt Lake City, Utah, was a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arizona, and had a previous job in Utah working for the United Way. Now she’s working to help people in California who have Cystic Fibrosis, a debilitating, usually fatal disease affecting thousands of people. In all fairness, life should be going great for her, but this week it certainly isn’t. She found out she can’t go on the trip to Paris she bought a plane ticket for almost a year ago, her old car has had problem after problem since she arrived in California (this week it’s mysteriously leaking coolant), and she’s so ill with some unidentifiable virus, she can barely lift her head off the pillow. The problem is, when she’s sick, she isn’t allowed to come into the office to work under any circumstance because, if she came into contact with any of the people who have Cystic Fibrosis who frequently drop into the office, she could literally kill them. She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t smoke, she’s very good at managing her personal finances, and she’s a very kind, polite person. So what’s up?

Another relative of mine, one of the very finest men I know and very successful in his field, decided to give up his lucrative job in the corporate world so he could work for a nonprofit organization. He wanted to use his highly developed skills to contribute something to society, to do some real good in the world. He took a sizable cut in pay and was told to come in and affect change in the particular arm of the organization he was hired to work in, so that’s what he set out to do. Right away, he found some troubling things about how certain assets had been managed in the past and, although he tried his best, he didn’t fit in with the culture of some of the others in the organization. He was seen as an outsider and a threat by his immediate supervisor who hadn’t been the one to hire him. Despite all his good work and expertise, this supervisor hauled him into his office one day and told him he could choose to resign or be fired. Of course, it was in his best interest to resign. Now he’s hunting for a new job, but it isn’t easy because his short stint at the nonprofit didn’t do him any favors. He’s feeling discouraged and depressed, as you can imagine. How could this happen to someone like him?

Well, I have a news flash for you; life is pretty difficult for every single person on the planet. It’s harder for some than others, but chances are, everyone is eventually brought to their knees in some way and feels like they’re at their breaking point at some time. One of my favorite speakers and writers is Neal A. Maxwell, a prominent leader in my church who had dedicated his life to service until it was cut short by a painful battle with terminal cancer. One of my favorite quotes of his is, “Irony is the hard crust on the bread of adversity.” If you think you’re here on earth just to party and have a good time, you’re probably pretty disappointed by now. The real purpose of life, actually, is to grow and learn how to solve problems. It’s to learn how to love others through experiencing difficulties of our own so we can be compassionate and relate better to one another.

So how do you cope with depression when everything seems to be going to hell? Do you curl up in a little ball in a dark room and cry? Do you complain to everyone you know, assuming that no one is as afflicted as you are? I’ve known a few people like this over the years and guess what; they’re annoying and they don’t help anyone. Most of all, they don’t help themselves. The best examples of people I know who make significant progress in their own lives and do more good for everyone around them are the ones who shut up about their own problems, persevere through the tough times, and reach out to help other people. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and climb themselves out of their holes if they can. If they need help, they ask for it, but not in a whiny, complaining way so others will feel sorry for them. The next thing they do, is to reach down and help pull someone else out of their hole.

In the Secret Haven series I wrote, Laura Adams is an altruistic young woman, self sacrificing and trying to make a difference. She had to face some significant challenges in her past life, particularly to do with her health, causing her loved ones to think of her as fragile, maybe even weak. She was minding her own business, doing the best she could when, on a dark, snowy road in Connecticut one night, her life was changed forever. She and her parents were targeted by a hate group as a means of revenge and also as a way to discourage the FBI team investigating them, of which her older brother was a part.

Laura became a victim in a terrible car crash staged by one of the members of this hate group to look like an accident. Her parents were both killed in the crash and she ended up in the hospital barely clinging to life. Her brother was forced to put her into hiding to protect her, all the way across the country with an old friend of his who was a complete stranger to her. Everything she knew and loved was instantly gone: her career, her family, her identity, and her freedom. Her body was broken and she was in severe pain, not to mention the bad case of PTSD she was experiencing, all while she had to adjust to life with a strange man, ten yers her senior. She realized she could curl up in a little ball and cry or she could try to carry on and make the best of the situation. She made a conscious choice to forge ahead, not letting the unfairness of everything rob her of a real life. In the process, she found an inner strength which surprised both her and her brother. To her great amazement, and her protective older brother’s horror, she also found true love. She had to face challenge after challenge as the hitman charged to murder her hunted her across the country, but in the end, she found the strength to overcome them with courage and love.

How do you cope when your freshly baked loaf of adversity has a big, hard crust of irony on it? Tell me your stories of when life gave you lemons and you made lemonade. We all need inspiration and encouragement sometimes to push through the tunnel to that pinprick of light at the end. Tell me about the people in your life who have inspired you.