Thinking Out Loud, Volume DXXIII

My son recently shared a story with me, and since then I've given it a lot of thought. Please allow me to give you a brief summary to see if you get the same message I did. A young woman had about reached her breaking point due to some struggles she had been facing, so she went to her mother for advice. The older lady listened intently, then asked her daughter to step into the kitchen with her. She placed three pots of water on the stove and turned the fire on high. In one pot she placed carrots, in the next one she placed eggs, and in the third one she placed ground coffee beans. Without saying a word, she let each of them boil for twenty minutes. When she turned off the heat, she asked her daughter to look in each pot and tell her what she saw. "I see carrots, eggs, and coffee," the young woman replied. Her mom then instructed her to feel the carrots, which had become soft and mushy. Next she extracted an egg and removed the shell to find an egg that had become hard. Then she ladled each of them a cup of coffee as they sat down to enjoy it's rich aroma and bold taste. "What are you trying to tell me, Mom?," the daughter asked. Mom explained, "The carrots, the eggs and the coffee each faced identical struggles; the same kind of heat. The carrots went in strong and rigid, yet they emerged soft and weak. The eggs faced the fire with soft, liquid hearts, yet came out hardened. In both of those situations, the water that changed the carrots and the eggs so drastically, emerged basically unchanged. The coffee beans, however, changed the water and made it into something pleasant." You see, we can allow our environment to change us, or we can change our environment. Our world can change us, or we can change our world. The struggles we face can harden us, they can weaken us, or we can use those struggles to create something good. I told you this story a few months ago, but I once used the incident of losing my job to place me in a position to get a much better job. Instead of having a pity party, I held my head up and landed a job that I couldn't have gotten if I hadn't first gone through the turmoil of losing the one I had. Whether I be broken, depressed, joyful, or on the mountain top, it's not the things I've faced that put me here....it's how I dealt with the things I've faced. Am I carrots, eggs or coffee? The choice is mine. Preston