A Letter To A Younger Me

Dear Younger Me -

Where do I start? Do I give you advice on how to make your life easier; or do I encourage you to stay on the path you are on?  Do I help you to avoid the challenges, pain and adversity that you faced; or do I push you down a path of even more adversity and challenge?  Do I try and change the choices that you have made? Ultimately, all those choices have made me who I am today.

If I could give you some advice, it would be these couple things.

TRUST
I know you feel like your life is being flipped upside down and that you will never be able to get up off your back.  It seems as if you are the only one struggling with whatever is going on and that everyone else is thriving.  You doubt yourself, your abilities, your blessings and your purpose.  You feel as if everyone is much higher than you, further down the road, and better than you.  You feel hurt, confused and lost.  What I want you to do is step back, close your eyes, and say the following… “Thank you, I trust you”.

All of those scenarios are going to happen, and will continually happen in life.  If you don’t have adversity in life, it either means you aren’t growing; or you are dead.  Be thankful for the fact that you are alive to face the struggle!  Let’s switch our mindset and realize that every struggle, doubt and bit of adversity is really just an opportunity.  It is an opportunity to get better and to see what you are made of.  It is a chance to develop skills that you don’t currently have.  You might be in the midst of an amazing lesson or set of lessons, which are developing perseverance, faith, attentiveness, action, focus, patience, love, understanding and trust.  I want you to trust in your faith and that everything that you are going through is designed to prepare you for a bigger purpose that you don’t even see or believe yet.  Trust the process! Trust the path on which you are walking is designed to help grow you to make an impact on this world!

CHERISH
I know you are going through big challenges right now!  You are facing challenges with work, family, friends, finances and finding the right path to go down.  Discomfort, nervousness, uneasiness and doubt fill your head daily.  Let me give you a hint and a heads up… adversity it coming!  You are going to keep facing adversity and it will come in waves bigger than you think you can stand up against!  When these moments come along, as hard as it will be, I want you to Cherish The Challenges.

 I know you think I am crazy right about now, saying, “Why would I love the challenges?”  It is because every moment that you get challenged, you can get better.  You have the opportunity to grow into something more beautiful, strong and resilient than you were before.  A way to realize that you will be okay is to sit down, pull out a piece of paper and begin writing.  I want you to write out all of the blessings in your life.  This could be as simple as the fact that you have a roof over your head, food to eat and someone who loves you.  This will remind you that you have amazing blessings in every area of your life that are taken for granted.  If you reflect on it, I bet you will even find that many of your blessings only came about because of times of adversity.  Post this note, look at it, let it fill you up in those moments of doubt, fear and struggle.  Knowing you have all these blessings will make it easier to appreciate the challenges when they come.  You will see that many times an amazing blessing is right on the other side of the adversity.  You don’t get to enjoy the view from the top of the mountain without the journey to the top.  The more difficult the journey, the more you appreciate and have earned the view!

SERVE
Right now, I know you are in survival mode.  I know you are feeling like you don’t have enough time in the day for yourself!  Making it through school, dealing with social cliques, the latest fashion trends and social media musings is hard enough; let alone thinking about someone else!  The time taken up by school, homework, sports, jobs, take home work is more than you feel like you can handle.  When the stress of life begins to pile up, I want you to sit back and focus on the one person you can help in life.  I know this defies logic, but do it.

Who is the one person you can help today?  Prioritize making a difference in their day.  The most amazing thing happens when you do this.  When you look to serve someone else, it fills you up with joy and gives you that spiritual and emotional lift you have been looking for.  When you make this the priority, all the other inconsequential tasks that you were stressing about melt away.  They no longer carry any weight on your mind because you now have focus, clarity and purpose.  What better thing to focus on than changing someone else’s life.  While changing and impacting their life in a positive way, it is also changing and impacting you.  Making an impact doesn’t have to be anything big!  It can start small by sending them a hand written note and letting them know what they mean to you.  It could be physically helping them with a task or just taking the time to listen.  It is amazing how looking to serve someone else lifts your spirits and reenergizes you!

I know you want all the answers to your problems, but my answer is, you will make it!  At the end of the day, all of the struggles that you are going to face are going to make you who you are, and I don’t want to deprive you of any of them!  They will help define you and build you up into the person you will become.  This life wasn’t meant or designed to be a walk in the park.  It was meant to help you grow and push you to become the best version of yourself!  You never know how you may one day be able to change someone’s life because you can help them through a challenge that you have already persevered through!  Trust in the process and cherish the challenges that come your way so that you can better serve those around you!  Make everybody you meet better for having interacted with you!

God Bless
- To a younger me... From an older me

Ps. Whenever you doubt, Read this and press it upon your heart!
“2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”  James 1: 2-4