An Unhappy Experience

I have been renting out two of my apartments for nearly five years now, and, aside from some minor hiccups, I have had a largely positive experience. That was until the most recent tenant who entered my home. In hindsight, there were many red flags, but since I had no bad experiences, I went ahead anyway. The entire experience turned sour within a month.

The problem with these kinds of experiences is that I tend to be pinned to the problem and hardly let go, to the extent that I can’t even focus on my everyday work. Someone who was in depression and is still fighting some demons, this is not an easy experience. The good part is, I have started looking in the direction of God.

Since I do believe in God, the only question I have for myself is, why would God put me through this? I can clearly see that the same experience is not affecting my wife as much, though we are going through it together. She is a warrior and seems to be handling this well.

What about me, though?

What About Me? | A Spent Warrior? | Or A Warrior Getting Stronger?

While it is easy to surmise that it is the latter, getting there was impossible without God. You see, the experience has made me aware that I can’t focus on the work at hand when I have a lingering problem. This was the same earlier, and even worse in a corporate setup. In hindsight, I realized that every time a problem cropped up, I was out of action until the problem was solved or settled. Now, the timeline becomes an issue in such situations. If the problem got sorted in days, then it's ok; in weeks, some problem, but still ok; in months, now that’s a big problem. So, a problem caused a bigger problem in my life – delay and procrastination. And I had many such experiences where the problem would linger on for months.

The result was that I got out of action, and that hurt my results. Imagine being the best, yet unable to perform at my best all the time. That doesn’t fall in the definition of best. Because best without consistency is only best sometimes. I know I was good, and if I had doubts, then there were enough and more awards to show that I was good. But somehow, I was being timid when a problem showed up. I had to deal with it, and I had to do it now.

What Could I Do?

One of the things that I did was visualization. Visualization puts things in perspective. You would have seen many outer space videos where we look at Earth and realize how tiny human beings are, then we look at Jupiter and realize how small Earth is, then we look at the Sun and realize how small Jupiter is, and then the solar system, our galaxy, a cluster of galaxies and then the whole universe. That’s when we realize that a human being is almost impossible to be seen at the universal level; heck, it’s impossible to see even a single human from the space station, let alone the universe. And yet for some reason I believed that my problems, which are much tinier than me, were something I had to tackle before I could go forward. Insane, right?

But that’s not all. I took the problem too far beyond what it was. The universe is the creation of God. And our problem is non-existent in comparison to the universe. Then how could it be a big problem for God to deal with our problem? Do you see the issue I had? I blew up the problem to be bigger than the universe, and unwittingly, bigger than God.

Blew Up the Problem | Lost Perspective | Still, God Helped

This was the issue. I blew up the problem to insurmountable proportions and believed in the problem more than its solution or God. Think about the proportions I had explained. The entire human population taken together is nothing but a super-duper-absolutely-invisible-microscopic dot when compared to the universe. It only means that our problems are basically non-existent when compared to universal proportions.

And worst still, our problems are nothing (absolutely nothing) when compared with God. Here is a Being who can transform the universe with a single swipe of His finger, and I, for some reason, believed that the problem was bigger. How wrong could I have been? This realization is what set me up for recovery and correction. This article is proof that I have got a good level of control back, thanks to God. Why do I say that? Well, the problem and the problematic tenant are still in my house, and yet I am here talking about it in this article.

So, in summary, I will say that putting things in perspective is important. But you know, what is even more important? Trusting God. Even if you put your problem in perspective, you have to know that God will help you solve the problem. And that’s where boldness and strength come from – from God and not from us.

And may the Lord God Almighty, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, keep you bubbling in boldness and strength!!

Image Courtesy: Problem by Geralt at Pixabay(dot)com