ACCEPT

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing
 is that you meet it with the best you have to give. -Earl Nightingale

I bet you have problems. I mean we all do, right? Some more severe than others, but we all have our burdens. I had a conversation recently regarding how you figure out the right way to deal with bad situations. I’m really not an expert.
As far as my worst day, it probably starts with me spilling coffee on my shirt, not getting the laundry done, not getting the dishes done, forgetting someone’s birthday, being too lazy to cook dinner, and then ends with having the cable go out just in time for my Red Wings game to start, and then they lose, in overtime. All of this would be done fifteen minutes behind schedule, just to make it as bad as possible.
I mean it when I say this…I’ve led a pretty charmed life without too much grief or tragedy. All the “small stuff” is just, well, small.
I tried to put myself in her situation, and I couldn’t imagine.
I tried to imagine other situations that would be equally stressful, and I mentally made a list of all of the things that either a friend or family member has gone through this year:
Divorce
Miscarriage
Infidelity
Unemployment
Cancer
Death of a spouse
Complicated and difficult pregnancy
Death of a child
Addiction
Loss of faith
Death of a sibling
Loss of home to fire
Infertility
Diabetes
Death of a lifelong friend
Financial stress
________ (Please fill in the blank. I’m sure this list is just the tip of the iceberg. For me, I‘d put “poop explosion“, since that‘s what I‘ve been dealing with lately. It doesn‘t even compare with the rest, but it still sucks.)
Looking at this list, I can honestly say that although I feel terrible for those dealing with these issues, if we wrote them all on a piece of paper, then mixed them up and drew one, which we had to deal with, I’d pray pray PRAY for poop explosion.
Again, I wouldn’t wish these on anyone, but I wouldn’t want to deal with them either.
But going through this process, I realized something. When you are faced with a problem, whether it be a poop explosion or the most unimaginable terrifying situation, you deal with them the same way.
It’s a safe bet that nobody enjoys poop.

But as a parent, I still have to deal with changing diapers.
I can complain all day, feeling sorry for myself, but my eight month old son is still going to poop. It brings new meaning to the phrase, “Shit happens.” Not every minute is sunshine and roses, right? All I can do is deal with the poop using the tools that I have and with the best of my ability, and know that one day he’ll be potty trained.
Of course, the resources available to deal with things like divorce, cancer, and death are completely different than diapers and wipes. Sometimes people are completely alone and without any of the right tools for the job. But some of them manage to get through just fine, because they have the right attitude. They accept what they are dealing with, whether it be a miscarriage or obesity or an addiction, and they face it head on with a positive attitude. Maybe, just maybe, they wind up better than ever.
Knowing you can’t change anything about a situation doesn’t make it okay. There are things that happen to us in life that just suck. And there are those that says things like, “everything happens for a reason,” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Well that’s nice for them, but when you’ve been trying to get pregnant for eighteen months or you just lost your daughter those aren’t exactly words of comfort. Sometimes you just need someone to be angry or unhappy with you, because that’s all you can muster at the moment.
Hopefully you have the strength to say to yourself, “I’m not happy about this, and I’m not going to just give up, but I don’t have a solution to the problem and I can’t fix it. It’s not in my control. Instead I’m going to focus on what I can do.”
Because that’s all anyone can really do, is give it all they’ve got. And if you’ve done that, you might not get the outcome you wanted, but you’ll know you did everything you could.