Mon 5  Feb 2007
Learning to Cope or Learning to Change?

An entry like this one, sheds some light on my thinking at the time:

As I’m battling for survival here in SA, I continually find that there is in the
back of my mind this thought that I can go back to China, and life will be
easy again.  Easy in China meant that I spent more time with God than
ever before, and that pressure was little.  I cannot say that it didn’t bring
growth – or maybe I could?  Maybe all the stuff I did, didn’t really cause
growth in my life – it’s only here in the real world with pressure, that those
things get to bring real growth.

Or is this a lie that we’ve been fed, that says that we have to go through
difficulty for most of our life to grow – so that we can face the other
difficulties that lie ahead?

What was happening here?

Reading this now, I recognize in here one of the things that often keep us
from moving forward, and that is a twisting of truth in a subtle way.

I have never and still do not deny the fact that we grow in pain and through
hardship.  However, I have since this time learnt that we can consciously
grow through the good times also.

Learning how to change a life of pain and hardship into a better life is a
better bit of growth than simply practicing to cope with the hardship.  And I
guess that is what I hadn't realized at this time.  I was correctly using the
time to learn to cope with difficulty.  But I had not learnt that sometimes,
learning the art of implementing change, is a higher art than the art of
coping.
Learning to cope, or
Learning to change?