This morning, at 8:25am, I fell on my butt.

I was reading the Bible app, like a good person, and I was walking out of my dorm to my class. While reading, I quickly found myself on the ground, hearing the crack of ice underneath me. And ya know what? I didn’t get up immediately. I just sat and probably said a lot of words I would regret now. Slipping on ice was the last thing I needed this week, yet it happened.

Isn’t that a testament to life?

I definitely did not need to slip on ice this morning. But I got up, and I mustered up the courage to keep going. To show up to my 8:30am class (when I easily could have turned around and crawled into bed).

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I’ve been struggling a lot lately. Things that are completely out of my control are slipping through my fingers, and I am desperately trying to put them back together. So it’s certainly a season of frustration, but I also think it’s showing me that I’m not supposed to be in control of everything, and I forget that. All I am supposed to do is keep looking to Jesus and run my race.

When life hits you, and I mean really hits you, and nothing is going right (or at least it seems), you’re going to want to sit on the ice. You’re not going to want to get up. You’re going to want to throw yourself a pity party. Hell, I have been wanting to do that all day.

But I don’t want to anymore.

I want to choose to show up, even though moping around is pretty nice for awhile. When we feel dark, the darkness is comforting. We never want to get comfortable with the darkness, because we belong in the light. In hope. Even when we suffer and even when it seems like everything good has hit the fan.

I don’t know if my circumstances will change, and I can’t bank on that. But what I can control is how I look at my circumstances. If I want to stay on the hard, cold floor, or to get up and risk slipping again. We can always slip again, but what matters is that we keep getting up.

Because there is a light at the end of the confusing tunnel. Even if everything seems out of order, you will survive. And one day we will look back and know that these moments were necessary, in building our character and in shifting our direction.

I think Martin Luther King puts it pretty nicely. He says, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

So let’s keep standing. Let’s keep growing. We just need to keep showing up, and eventually there will be no more ice, and all we will see is the sun.

Xoxo,

Ash