How do you handle it when bad things happen at good events?…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":{"article":"This weekend we had our annual summer picnic, and it turned out to be an awesome day.\u00a0 God gave us pretty much the perfect 4 hour window with almost no smoke from the wild fires, and just enough of a breeze to keep the normal boaters off the lake, but not so much that we couldn\u2019t enjoy some tubing ourselves in a very wide-open expanse.\u00a0 After the party ended, my wife joined me on the boat for another few hours, and it was almost the perfect day\u2026\u2026 until I tore up my prop on a sandbar because I forgot to check the depth of the prop before leaving the sandbar.\r\n\r\nI have had things like that happen all my life.\u00a0 You think you have the perfect day, but then there is ONE little wrinkle that kind of brings you back down to reality.\u00a0 If ONLY that one thing didn\u2019t happen, how great would that particular experience have been?\u00a0 I read a story years ago that really put things like that in perspective.\u00a0 I forget the details, but the gist of it was that sometimes you have to give a little get a little.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost like there is a small price you have to pay for good things that come your way.\u00a0 When we go to an amusement park, for instance, we have to give something, our money, for the entertainment that we are about to enjoy.\r\n\r\nI truly believe that God works that way.\u00a0 There is give and take in most every experience.\u00a0 If before the picnic I was told that the price of having a great event, with essentially no smoke and little boat traffic on the lake, was going to be a damaged prop, or there was going to be no picnic at all due to bad weather, I would have gladly taken the damaged prop.\u00a0 The old me would have whined about the situation and let it take away from the rest of the great event.\u00a0 The current (and hopefully permanent) me, is certainly bummed about the damage, but just look at it as the standard tradeoff for the benefits we received to even be able to have the picnic.\r\n\r\nI don\u2019t consciously think about and expect something like that to happen when events are going extremely well.\u00a0 I think that would certainly be a negative way to go through life.\u00a0 But when those things do happen now, I tend to roll with them better when they do.\u00a0 A few years ago during a hike out west, the soles of my boots were literally crumbling off as I walked.\u00a0 I was picking up pieces of rubber as they fell off to not leave any trash behind.\u00a0 By the end of the hike, I parted ways with my trusted footwear that lasted me 10-15 years.\u00a0 The experience I took from that hike was totally worth the price of having to invest in new hiking boots.\r\n\r\nAs events happen in your own life, don\u2019t expect perfection.\u00a0 Very rarely is that the case.\u00a0 When the yang creeps into your yin, just know that that is the way life has, and probably always will work.\u00a0 If we always take, but never give, we certainly would become selfish.\u00a0 Sometimes I think the giving is just done for us (damaging a prop, trashing some boots) to keep us grounded and remind us that the world needs us to give more than what we take from it if we are going to move it in a positive direction.","featured_image":"","featured_image_id":"","featured_article":""},"categories":[],"class_list":["post-408","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n