By Ngor Khot Garang
At times in life when nothing is working out, patience begins to wane. I have seen this with men who were energetic with promising future.
I mean people who have given themselves to God and surrendered everything they have to God only for that God to let them down.
Many have given up and others are still in the process. They above everything blamed God for being cruel.
For others, they don’t know what wrong they have done to deserve all the pain and suffering that they are passing through.
You know what; a life devoid of problems is a life devoid of purpose. The gods, they knew themselves wiser and imposed on us a life with problems.
Nothing is as dull; nothing is as uninteresting as a life without challenges. This is age-old wisdom, but I learned it through direct experience. The times when my life was a little okay as a young boy, were also the times when I was most likely to slide into depression, into all sorts of unwarranted hedonism and sadness.
So then, I began to pray to God not to give me a life without problems but to make me a man that was ripe for every problem that came my way.
For a human being to find happiness in life, and I mean happiness, they must wake up every day with a problem they are trying to solve. They must wake up with a puzzle they are trying to piece together, a boulder they are pushing up a mountain. And when that one boulder is pushed up, another stone much bigger must come in sight so they can roll that too up the mountain.
We got where we are as humans because of problems. We got to the top of every species because we solved more problems. And those that didn’t became extinct.
How then shall we judge a successful man? By the problems he solved and the impact his solutions had on his life as an individual and on us as a whole.
When you meet someone, don’t ask them what job they do, rather, ask them what problems they are solving for themselves and the human race at large.
Isn’t it a secret of life that we don’t appreciate things that come easy?
But beyond that, the men who became the eyes of society, the men who we praised as heroes are the men who solved more problems. When an apple fell on one man, he discovered the something great for humanity, while another developed the light bulb.
When you are not solving problems, you are lifeless. For you to grow in life, you need a fair share of problems, something to give you a headache, something to give you sleepless nights. Like iron being sharpened and hardened by fire, so do we become in the kiln of problems.
For you to grow there has to be something in your life that is difficult and challenging. There has to be a goal where the chance of failure is very possible, and it has to be hard enough where you’ll be required to call upon forces within you that you didn’t know existed.
There has to be a point where you wonder to yourself, “Maybe I can’t do it—maybe I’m doing all this for nothing.” If you don’t daydream about quitting, about going back to what you used to do, then you picked something that wasn’t hard enough.
So, when you go out tomorrow morning, consider yourself lucky if you have more problems compared to the person next door. Consider yourself blessed when you are faced with challenge after challenge.
And when you come to the end of this life race, gasping for breath, you will indeed say; “I ran a good race, I fought a good fight, I was human for I solved problems.”
That is what you should put much of your attention on. It won’t last forever that is what you should understand. In this life, it is always never easy but that is not all there is to whine about. God is not mad at us, and we should be fully aware of that, that God will surely make a way.