Have you ever had something happen in your life that you’d consider “the straw that broke the camel’s back”? In other words, having one more negative thing happen to you where you end up throwing your hands in the air in total frustration? Recently, I experienced this with something that really shouldn’t have mattered as much as I allowed it to.
It all began about two months ago when my blog started having some performance issues with how my entries are publicized for the world to see. There are two ways I can do this. One is manually, where essentially I login to my blog and post an entry on the fly. The other is scheduled, where I set a date and time in the future for an entry to be posted that I’ve previously written. For the most part, I’ve done the latter since the beginning, but one day back in September, this feature suddenly stopped working like it should. I discovered this when I didn’t get the daily email confirming that my entry was published. As a side note, I should probably mention that when each of my blog entries are published, three things usually happen. They immediately show up on my site, all of my subscribers get a confirmation email, and each of the social media I utilize receive a small snippet informing those connected to me there of the new entry. Unfortunately, most of this wasn’t working each time I attempted to schedule my blogs.
Initially, I got pretty irritated by this, but given I had a backup option to manually publish them, I quickly got over it. Ever since, I’ve been manually publishing while waiting on the software developers to resolve the problem. But when the manual publish began having performance issues as well just over a week ago, I suddenly became totally unraveled. So unraveled, that I threw a 2-year old type of temper tantrum at my kitchen table the night it started to happen and sadly, my partner had to witness it.
So why did this get to me so much? Well as I said in the beginning of this entry, that old saying of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was quite fitting because for the past five months, I’ve been so completely overwhelmed by plenty of other issues going on in my life including, but not limited to, my health, my partner, my finances, and a few friends. Thus when this happened, it became one more thing that wasn’t working in my life the way I thought it should be working, which immediately made me angry and even slightly rageful. But when I finally calmed down the next day, I realized it was my ego that’s been the one saying things aren’t happening in my life the way they should be.
So why does God allow us to be challenged like this, by a bunch of unfavorable things happening all at once to us in our lives. Well, what if those events are not as unfavorable as our egos tends to make us always try to believe. What if instead they are only to help us grow our faith, our patience, and our trust that everything will work itself out when it’s meant to? And what if they are simply meant to help us let go of the control we often exude so much of in life? The latter of which I’ve struggled with quite a bit throughout my own. This is why I’m convinced that the only reason why this blog issue became “the straw that broke the camel’s back” is because there are still areas for me to face and let go of that control.
I think the reality and the solution to all this is really just one of acceptance. Acceptance that God’s got my back, even when each of those unfavorable things are happening to me all at once. Acceptance that God is helping me to grow stronger spiritually through them. And acceptance that it will work itself out when it’s meant to, so long as I keep letting go of that control…
Peace, love, light and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson