“I assume since this has been going on all day it’ll continue tomorrow in some fashion,” he said.

It had been raining for 4 days straight. I guess Mother Nature had decided that one hurricane and one tropical storm in the previous eight weeks did not bring us enough rain. Never you mind that there was a turkey shortage for Thanksgiving, closed roads around multiple counties, and devastated homes, churches and businesses. That rain still came down without apology.

Still, assuming that the rain was going to continue made no sense to me. If I had meteorological instruments available to me, then I could find out if it’s a weather system that would be around for a few days. But generally speaking, looking at one day’s rain shouldn’t predict the next day’s weather.

We do this in our daily lives, don’t we? We experience adversity, challenges, events that turn our days, weeks, or lives upside down and all around. Sometimes we can bounce back. Sometimes we can take the adversity for what it is — a one-time challenge that we can meet head-on and conquer.

Other times, adversity comes over and over.
Sometimes in continual drips that by themselves are not a big deal but once strung together, challenge our sense of well-being.
Sometimes adversity comes in one big wave of no good very bad days, and all we want is to shrink under our covers with Netflix until the storm is gone. Which is understandable. And, at times, even healthy.

It crosses over into unhealthy when we start to assume that the negative events we experience are who we are instead of what we’re living through. We start to take the identity of “bad things always happen to me” and “that’s just my luck” and “things are never going to get better; I guess this is my new reality.” We lose our confidence, our dreams for the future, even our hope.

BUT - if we can remember that today’s rain (challenges) doesn’t automatically predict tomorrow’s rain (challenges), and that crappy things happening in our lives are tough, but we have the capacity to be tougher, I think we can remember that no season is ever wasted, and one of these it’ll be sunny again.