The Blessings in Adversity

Adversity has a way of forcing us to de-clutter our lives.

A few nights ago, my hubby and I were cleaning up the dinner dishes. I opened the cabinet door underneath the kitchen sink to get out the dishwashing detergent and I found everything in that cabinet wet. There was standing water inside the cabinet.

My heart sank. This was not good. We had a leak somewhere. I reported my findings to my hubby who also doubles as our resident plumber. He joined me as we proceeded to remove everything from the cabinet to dry it off and find the source of the leak.

I have to admit that I was kind of surprised at the amount of stuff that had accumulated under there. I would love to say that I’m one of those people who does yearly spring cleaning and tosses out the things I no longer need, but alas, I am not. We have been in our house for twelve years and I don’t think I have ever cleaned that cabinet out.

I found cleaning items I haven’t used in years. I had a bunch of empty jars, that I had never used. I probably tossed half of the stuff down there.

After some investigation, the leak turned out to be from the garbage disposal. We bought a new one and replaced the leaky one.

I was amazed at how organized and neat the cabinet was after I put the thinned out items back.

That leaky sink made me take stock of what I had and throw away what I didn’t need. It also reminded me that adversity has a way of making us do the same in our lives.

When unexpected and unwanted circumstances rain down on us, we realize that we too, need to take stock of the baggage we have accumulated, whether physical or emotional. We find ourselves asking if the baggage is worth hanging onto. While things like anger, fear, resentment, guilt or pain that we are carrying around, may have served a useful purpose at some point, do they still serve a useful purpose now? Is it possible that those things are just cluttering up our hearts and souls?

When adversity strikes, we often find ourselves praying a lot more and through prayer, we are often able to let go of the negative and hold on to only what we need. It takes a lot of energy to carry those things around and we need that energy to deal with whatever the storm may be.

Eventually the storm passes and when it does, we find our heart and souls more grateful and lighter because we threw away the stuff we no longer needed. I find a lot of grace in that knowledge.

Perhaps you needed a little grace today too.

Have an awesome day!

Wendy 🙂