"Show Me The Money"
Stuff happens. There are not a lot of certainties in life, but one thing you can count on is that things will not always go as you plan. Hard times are inevitable and as so many know from recent years, financial hard times can come out of seemingly nowhere. If you have never had financial issues, consider yourself extremely blessed. Chances are that you’ve faced difficult times in another way though, or you will. The way I see it, you have three ways to respond to difficult situations.
Look for Pity
When going through a hard time or when the unexpected happens, there can be a tendency to share your hardship with others with hopes to find empathy from them. There’s nothing wrong with asking for prayer, but sometimes we are looking for empathy from others more than help from God when we do so.
I tend to not share my struggles with anyone unless I’ve been struggling with it for some time because I don’t like to receive the empathetic response that usually come. I don’t want pity from other people but that is often their response.
Ignore It or Wait It Out
I think this is the most common response to difficult circumstances. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing and everything will eventually straighten out. This option can easily go hand in hand with the first option, especially if a long period of time is necessary for everything to work out. I think it’s important to share your struggles with someone or a few people who are close to you so that they can help you through them. Trying to wait out the storm alone can be wearing on your mind, body, and spirit.
I used to keep all of my struggles bottled up, and that seemed to only make things worse. In recent years, I’ve learned to share my struggles with my family and close friends, and they often have suggestions that I would not have thought of without them. It’s a humbling experience and often necessary for making progress out of hard situations.
Do Something About It
Finally, you can do something about the situation you are in. I think a lot of times we progress through these three options as stages but if we would just start by doing something, we might be able to move on from the difficult situation more quickly. One of my professors in college used to always say, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” If you all you do is carry on as you always have, your struggles may pass, but they are likely to return.
I think this is the hardest thing to do because it can involve pain or actions that you would rather not do. For example, I am struggling financially. I could continue on as I have in the past and catch up on everything, but chances are that eventually I would be right back where I am now. So this time I am doing something different. We have some friends who needed a car, so we sold one of ours to them. Not only did that give us some cash to apply towards our bills, but we also reduced our monthly and other regular costs in fuel, insurance, scheduled maintenance, registration, and inspections.
Another option to reduce our expenses is to turn off cable. A lot of decisions you make to get out of hard situations are only temporary or for a season. This is especially true when you are trying to get out of debt. For a season, we are cutting back as much as we can so that maybe, by the grace of God, we can finally get ahead of our debt instead of letting it control us.
If you are struggling with the same issue of debt and financial burdens, I ant to encourage you to check out Dave Ramsey. He has ways to make the debt monkey easier to approach.