#1. PARALLEL TRACKS
In an interview, Kay Warren used an analogy about life that has changed the way I view trials. She said the following:
“I’ve had hard times, but so has everybody else. I mean if I were able to sit down with every person reading this interview and we were able to just sit down over a cup of tea or coffee, we could share our lives and each of us could talk about the painful things, the sad things, the heartbreaking moments. I’ve had those as well. Some in my family happened in my past as a child, some were health concerns, some have been relational, we all have stuff, we all have painful things.I compare that to a set of parallel train tracks and on one side are painful things that break our hearts. But what’s running right alongside that train track of pain is the train track of joy of good things, of happiness, of beauty, loveliness where things go right. And those tracks run right next to each other through all of our lives and we sometimes try to outsmart the sorrow track and think that if we can just think positive thoughts or good thoughts that we won’t ever have to deal with sorrow and that just isn’t true. Sorrow comes to all of us. So it’s not a matter of somehow, by positive thinking, we can experience joy, no — it’s accepting both the sorrow and the joy together and choosing then to see it from God’s point of view and that’s a challenge.”
Picturing my life as a set of parallel tracks makes so much more sense than the peaks and valleys version of life. You can’t be on the mountaintop when you are down in the dumps, it’s one place or the other. But in the parallel tracks scenario, you can experience happiness even during the greatest of trials. I know it to be true because I have lived it … sorrow and joy running together on the same set of tracks.
Be careful not to miss the joy!