Rise above your Predicaments: Use your situations and Circumstances to your Advantage in Life

I came from a very humble background and grew up without a spoon. While some are born with a golden spoon, some with a sliver, I was born without a spoon. Life hasn’t been the best I could have asked for growing up. However, I have recorded some significant progress in life thus far. Like the story I once read in Normal Vincent Peal’s “Power of Positive Thinking,” two people who came from a similar background both grew up in a family where their father was abusive and alcoholic. One ended up successful, whereas the other ended up like his father. When they were asked why and how they ended up the way they were, they responded that they were the way they were because of their background. This tells you of our power as individuals to determine our future, not because of our past and circumstances we experienced, but based on our choices and decisions in life.

Life doesn't hand you what you deserve but what you demand. The key to demanding from life is to be conscious and deliberate about the raw materials you use, especially in tough times. These moments define your life's trajectory. Life is a balance of input and output. What you invest, you receive back, often multiplied. This conscious and deliberate approach puts you in the driver's seat of your life, empowering you to shape your future.

The law of seedtime and harvest, also known as the law of cause and effect, is a fundamental principle designed to ensure life's fairness and predictability. These laws guarantee a return in multiples of what we invest. You can't use negative resources and expect a positive outcome, just as you can't use positive resources and expect a negative result. Life's laws are just, ensuring that your efforts will be rewarded in the end.

Nobody can deny the possibility of God's interruptions sometimes to aid what you experience or the outcome you get in life occasionally. However, He set laws in motion by Himself to maintain a fair and predictable universe. Miracles do happen, which is always beyond human understanding and comprehension. Still, the only way to experience exceptional and creative miracles every single moment of one’s life is to partner with God in following all the laws He has set in motion to govern the earth. He is even interested in you having supernatural and outstanding moments beyond the ordinary experiences every day of your life, and the way He expects us to have these experiences continuously is to act by His rules.

Consequently, the primary way to manage your outcome is to focus on the process and ensure the quality assurance of the raw materials you are building with, and the ultimate outcome will surely be great. Everything in life is made up of and built from certain raw materials. The life you are currently living now is borne out of the ingredients you have put into it from the very first day you were born, and as such, you are already moulding and shaping the life you will live later in 2, 3, 5, 10, or 50 years to come by what you are doing or the things you refuse to do today.

The people, situations, and circumstances around you will come in various forms and sizes, and sometimes, they will be positive and help you advance your course in life. Other times, they come negatively, trying to hinder or obstruct your progress in life. The onus and responsibility then lie with you to determine how you will handle them and what you will do with these people, situations and circumstances. You either build them into bridges that link you with your future or make a great wall out of them to forestall you from leaving where you are to getting to where you ought to be in life.

Wherever you find yourself in life and whatever happens to you on earth is not meant to be a setback for you; it should be a setup for you to move to the next level of your life and destiny. This will not automatically happen; however, you must use them in conjunction with the ingredients or raw materials that every human being has at his/her disposal to create the life of your dream.

To sum it up, it is normal for you to have challenges in life, but it is abnormal for you to be limited, contained, and fail just because of your challenges. Kenneth Hagin said that “it is not the giant in life that defeats us nor is it the circumstance in life that limits us” because everybody has at least one giant to deal with in his/her lifetime. Every individual has limiting circumstances to deal with at every point in time. So why do some people succeed against all odds and others fail woefully? The difference between these two groups is what they make out of what happened to them based on how they handle the situations and circumstances that life and the people around present to them.

Don’t be a victim of your circumstances; rather, become the victor you are destined to be by using all the raw materials available to you in life to turn your adversities into opportunities for growth and development and your setbacks into setups for success.