BY SISTER LAURETTA LEIPZIG
A daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable and that she didn’t know how she was going to make it. She had one problem solved when another followed right behind. The father, a chef, took her to the kitchen. He filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. The three pots began to boil. Then he placed potatoes into one pot, eggs in a second pot and ground coffee beans in the third. He let them sit and boil saying nothing during the time. The daughter waited and wondered. After twenty minutes he turned off the burners. First he took the potatoes out of the pot and put them in a bowl. Then he put the eggs in a bowl and finally, ladled and put the coffee into a mug. He asked, “What do you see?” Of course the answer was potatoes, eggs and coffee. But he told the daughter to look closer and touch the potatoes. Once hard they were now soft. He asked her to peel the eggs and break them seeing now a hard-boiled egg. Then he asked her to sip the coffee to find a rich aroma and delicious taste. The father proceeded to tell his daughter that the potatoes, eggs and coffee were equally faced with some adversity – the boiling water. But each reacted differently. The potatoes became soft and weaker, the once fragile eggs became hard and stronger and the coffee changed the water and created something new. “Which are you?” the father asked.
Which are we? Life isn’t happening TO us; life is happening FOR us and an important thing that matters is how we choose to react to adversities and what we make out of them. Life unfolds for each of us exactly when it’s supposed to according to God’s plan. Therefore, we must let go of the picture we think it should be like and learn to find joy in what the story actually brings. Maybe we can look at our lives as a coin that has two sides – negative and positive sides. We’re got to embrace both sides. Then we must also realize that what we can “fix” we will do, and we will let go of all that is out of our control. If we are present to life right here and now, to life as it comes each day, we will learn to count our blessings. Life is about learning, adapting to or converting all the struggles that we experience and creating something new and positive in our lives. Thank God for this great blessed opportunity!