or difficult circumstances.
sur·vi·vor: a person who survives, especially a person remaining alive after an event in which others have died. a person who copes well with difficulties in their life.
I often think that sometimes people can underestimate what the other side of the mountain feels like. What can be scary about climbing the mountain is you don't always see what is on the other side. There could be a field of daisies or another mountain to climb. We never know until we get over the mountain what the days following will hold.
What we don’t think about is how comfortable of a life we can have operating in the survival mode. It can be much easier to sit at the bottom of the mountain and talk about how high it is, then to put the work in to actually get over it. Whether we want to believe it or not, some of us have made a very comfortable picnic at the bottom of the hill.
Living your life in that place can be a complete nightmare but it can also become a normal way of living. We spend day by day just trying to make it, or just trying to get through never truly living in our potential and just living in the now.
A few weeks ago, I had a revelation that was a cause of celebration but also a cause of fear. I realized that I was no longer just surviving in my life. I realized that God had brought me to a place where he was opening doors, blessing me, and I was no longer just trying to make it, but I was, in fact, making it.
People often say that the days following anything hard or traumatic in your life are the days that are the hardest. When you get to a place where you are no longer thinking about that thing that happened to you it causes you to shift your focus. Things that are deep down inside of you get revealed. The real reason so many of us just want to make it is because it gives us a reason to not address whatever else may be hidden beneath the hurt.
Well, that was me. Is me, on some days if I am going to be honest. I am far from reaching the destination that I want to be, but I had to wake up and realize that I was not living in a place of grief anymore. I had to wake up and start unpacking the other areas of my life and remind myself that I can no longer use anything that I have gone through as an excuse to why I am being stagnant.
When God gives me those gut checks its always hard because I know that as I walk into this next chapter he is telling me that I can not take excuses with me. I can not carry hurt, shame, or anger with me. I can no longer say that I am not living up to my potential because I just want to survive.
Exiting survival mode means a very important thing, you made it to the other side. This doesn’t mean that life is perfect, or that you are not still healing, but it does mean that God was walking with you, that you lived through those hard moments, and its time use those to go out and change lives.
Today, I decided that I have survived, I am no longer gasping for air and trying to make it. I can finally breathe on my own. I am a survivor.
