Faith | It’s not what happens to you that matters but how you handle it

It’s not what happens to you that matters; it’s how you handle it.

I began adopting this philosophy after my father told me a story: A news columnist and his friend stopped to buy a newspaper on a street corner in New York City. The vendor was extremely rude to the columnist, but the columnist responded pleasantly and the two continued walking down the street.

The friend asked, “Is he always that rude?”

“Yes, everyday,” replied the columnist.

The friend wondered why he responded so kindly and didn’t snap back at the rude man.

The columnist answered, “Why should I allow him to determine how I will be?”

That story changed my paradigm. I could choose my response! I didn’t have to allow myself to be controlled by anyone else!

This concept expanded to include my response to circumstances. I began practicing it immediately with something simple, the weather. I noticed how people’s moods seemed to be controlled by the weather.

“Oh, isn’t it just awful outside? I hate it when it’s gray and gloomy.” And conversely, “I just love the sunshine. I’m happy when it’s sunny.” So I made the decision that the weather would never control my mood. It was a simple place to start practicing my choice to respond.

Since no one is immune to challenges, although we may influence our circumstances and attempt to keep our lives trouble free, (such as refraining from smoking to avoid lung cancer or wearing a seat belt to increase our chances of surviving a car accident,) we can’t completely control what happens to us. What we can do is control our response to whatever happens.

I gained more insight into this philosophy when I read Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. He taught me that the maximum freedom we have is the ability to choose our response to our circumstances, to carry our own weather within ourselves, regardless of the hurricane outside.

This philosophy was put to the ultimate test 29 years ago when my husband died suddenly of a heart attack at age forty. I was thirty-seven years old; we had four children, ages 5 to 15, a mortgage, and a photography business in which he was the sole photographer. But even as he was dying, I had a certain knowledge that although his life was out of my control, still I could choose my response.

I believed that to God, it’s not bad to be dead! I knew that he truly was not dead but alive and with God, at peace, out of pain and engaged in some kind of important work that can only be done on the other side of the veil. And although my preference would have been that he lived, that was not one of my choices.

All my choices resided in my response.

I could trust God to see me through it and live in faith that God had a plan for my family. The other alternative was to fall apart and lose control of my response.

I chose faith.

Because of that choice, I experienced an amazing freedom and strength that I didn’t know I had. Moreover, in choosing to handle it with faith, I was able to access divine assistance I couldn’t have imagined was possible for me. Sometimes it’s in our darkest hours that God’s love and strength shine the brightest.

I got to test it again five years later when my house burned down. As I stood there watching it burn while the firemen diligently poured water on the flames, I knew that unfortunate stuff happens to everyone. It’s out of our control. It’s just another chance to respond.

My children were watching to see how to respond to this new circumstance. So my response was to model the concept, it doesn’t matter what happens, it only matters how you handle it. Together, we had the opportunity to set an example of trust and faith in God in the face of adversity to the many people in our community who were watching, and in so doing, strengthen and encourage our little corner of the world.

Every moment of every day, we get to respond to something, and in this process, we make ourselves. We shape and mold our character. What we do becomes who we are. When things are at their worst, often we are at our best.

Finally, who we have become is what we will take with us when we depart ...that is the only gift we can give back to God in return for the marvelous gift of life he gave to us; our gift of responding well to life’s challenges.

It truly doesn’t matter what happens to us. Freedom lives in how we respond.