Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 14:
“On the day of prosperity be joyful, and on the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.”
Brene Brown says we miss out on a great deal of life as we “forebode joy” for fear of loosing what we have. In other words, we do not give ourselves permission to experience the delight of our job or our children or our marriage or a special honor because we are always being ruled by fear of losing these things. We try to protect ourselves from the pain of loss by refusing to allow ourselves to enter into the joy of a moment. Of course, Brown says, in the end we lose all these things anyways, and what we did to forebode joy does not in the end protect us from the pain of these losses.
Of course, not all days are joy. Some are toil and trouble and opposition. We spend a deal of time barricading ourselves from these things also — sometimes decades — numbing ourselves with alcohol and drugs and running away again and again from conflict and the facing of our demons.
The task of life is learning to be present to our day. If the day is prosperity, there is joy to be experienced in it. If the is adversity, there is wisdom to be learned by it. All these things are from God.
“This is the day that the LORD has made,” the psalmist says, “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Or, it’s the day the LORD has made, where learn and grow from it. Either way, this day is the LORD’s making and we ought to live very present to it.
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