Aktive Direkt Hilfe e.V.

Faith is reacting positively to a negative situation. – Dr. Robert Schuller.

JThe longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past; we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you. We are in charge of our attitudes. – Charles R. Swindoll.

If there’s one thing that unites us all, it’s that we all suffer. We all triumph. We face obstacles in our lives and encounter things that throw us off our course and challenge our inner strength. That’s life, with the lesson often seen in retrospect. Without the difficult times, there would be no great times. Everything would just seem flat and uneventful, plain and boring.

There would be no impactful change without struggle. The beauty of life is overcoming what we think we cannot. Our self-esteem grows and we find strength in ourselves that we never knew existed.

This very point had me thinking about various struggles that I’ve been through in my life. I remember focusing mostly on the negative aspects of the situation. How bad I felt, how crappy the situation was, and how much I didn’t think things would ever change. Blah, blah, blah. It’s a vicious cycle.

But what if we focus on how our struggles change us and our lives for the better?

Would it be possible to improve negative situations if we thought about how we might benefit from them?

When I was unhappy with my research career, all I could think about was how much I screwed up my life. I went to university for seven years training as a researcher only to discover that I basically loathed it. So many days I would curse myself for making such a huge mistake in my life and going down the wrong path.

My negative thoughts were so powerful, I almost convinced myself that it was better to just live the rest of my life unfulfilled than face the alternative (change). I told myself that I could do what I wanted when I retired. I was 25 years old at the time!

That’s when I realized that I could rot in my own negativity or I could see things in a different light. Instead of cursing myself and “mistakes” (I’d rather call them “learning experiences”), I searched for lessons and meaning.

What was my unhappiness trying to tell me?

How was this discomfort nudging me to make a change in my life?

Without taking the wrong career path, I wouldn’t have found the happiness I have with my career today. I started this blog as a hobby while I worked as a researcher. It was something I could work on during my own free time and it brought me so much happiness that I spent most of my free time working on it. What started as a distraction from my real life became the thing that gave me life.

Little did I know, this hobby would not only serve as the catalyst for eventually leaving my unfulfilling career and starting my own business, but it would also lead me to discover my real passions in life.

Most surprisingly of all, I now see struggles in a new light. Instead of cursing an uncomfortable time, I see it as a message to change. Whether I listen or not is up to me. - Angela [1]

My career as a journalist has afforded me opportunities to interview “stars,” including NFL football greats, movie actors, music performers, best-selling authors, politicians, and TV personalities. These are the people who dominate the media. We fawn over them, poring over the minutiae of their lives: the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the aerobic routines they follow, the people they love, the toothpaste they use. Yet I must tell you that, in my limited experience, I have found Paul Johnson’s principle to hold true: our “idols” are as miserable a group of people as I have ever met. Most have troubled or broken marriages. Nearly all are incurably dependent on psychotherapy. In a heavy irony, these larger-than-life heroes seem tormented by self-doubt.

I have also spent time with people I call “servants.” Doctors and nurses who work among the ultimate outcasts, leprosy patients in rural India. A Princeton graduate who runs a hotel for the homeless in Chicago. Health workers who have left high-paying jobs to serve in a backwater town of Mississippi. Relief workers in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and other repositories of human suffering. The PhD’s I met in Arizona, who are now scattered throughout jungles of South America translating the Bible into obscure languages. I was prepared to honor and admire these servants, to hold them up as inspiring examples. I was not prepared to envy them.

Yet as I now reflect on the two groups side by side, stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. Without question, I would rather spend time among the servants than among the stars: they possess qualities of depth and richness and even joy that I have not found elsewhere. Servants work for low pay, long hours, and no applause, “wasting” their talents and skills among the poor and uneducated. Somehow, though, in the process of losing their lives they find them. The poor in spirit and the meek are indeed blessed, I now believe. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and it is they who will inherit the earth. — Philip Yancey

My seemingly simple first surgery didn´t go as well as I expected and I had to have a second operation three months later. At first I was worried. I got attacked with lots of terrible thoughts of not surviving it etc. until I realized that I don´t have to listen to all this. I had the choice to shut these thoughts out and to concentrate on the positive. So, I started to plan the things I would like to do as if the surgery would go well. I only accepted thoughts of the surgery being succesful and prayed for God to take complete control of my life. When the time came to go to the hospital I had perfect peace and I even felt the presence of an angel. I just knew Someone much bigger than me had it all under control so whatever the outcome would be it would be good.

Before the surgery I didn´t receive any calming medicine which they usually offer and I arrived to the operation theatre fully awake and fully at peace. Prior to the anasthesia I was even able to comment on how pretty it was there with big glass windows and I chatted with the staff. I also told them that the surgery had to turn out well because people from half around the world were praying for me. That was something very unusual to say in probably the most a-religious country in the world.

The surgery turned out to be a total success, though not without a fight. My doctor repeated to me in his own words twice that it was a miracle that it all worked out fine. In the ICU I had to fight a few setbacks and had to have two transfusions due to loss of blood. My blood pressure was low and I had a hard time breathing. But I believe that God helped me with all of this and I recovered miraculously fast. Instead of the original 10 day stay in case of complications, I went home on the 8th day, walking and moving around, without pain.

During my time at the hospital I became friends with my roommate and the next door lady, both in their 60s and both diagnosed with cancer before their surgery. They were waiting for the results of how the operation went for them and were of course quite nervous. We had many beautiful conversations about God and His love and care. It was very rewarding to be able to comfort them and help them. I prayed for them and felt that they will be fine. Now almost a month later one of them called me that she is completely cancer free with no need of chemotherapy or any other treatment.

I‘m thankful for the hundreds of friends around the world who prayed for me. I couldn´t have made it without them. I´m also very excited about the future. I know that God knows what is best for me and I can‘t wait to see where this will take us as a family and what He will do for us and through us... I am eternally thankfull!