Video games are quite common nowadays and there is much debate about whether or not they're useful in perpetually enriching our lives (or the lives of youngsters) or useful in killing vital learning brain cells. However, this particular blog will have nothing to do with that debate, but video games, as is the theme of this blog, will serve as an object lesson.
So, as many of us have grown up with video games, the lot of us know how they go. First, you have a beginning mission that usually serves as a get-to-know the controls and basis of the game. After the initial familiarizing mission, you move on to the real game. The real game with ever increasing difficult levels, skill acquisition and those ridiculously hard bosses calling you to use whatever skill you may or may not have obtained during your journey through each level. Your journey. What an appropriate phrase. In order to beat the game, you must go on the journey through each level. You cannot immediately fight the final boss and win the game -- though it would be so much easier if you could. You must acquire the necessary skills and/or weapons over the course of the ever challenging game if you are to defeat the final and most difficult boss.
Life is much like that journey. So often, we want to be where we feel we should be immediately, and we want to get there without difficulty or obstruction. However, without the journey, without the strength-giving obstacles, the destination would be lost. It is during the journey we obtain the necessary skills to overcome the little "bosses" of our lives-- and thus, eventually, the bigger "bosses"-- that will undoubtedly meet us along the way in an attempt to deter us from reaching our goal. For, if we were to come to the place of the prize (aka: our goal) right away, without the journey, we would be overwhelmed and overtaken by the bigger "bosses" that live in the land.
And take notice how each time the "boss" is harder to defeat. I mean, have you ever gone back to the first boss on a video game after defeating several subsequent bosses and shook your head at how ridiculously easy that boss now seemed to be? Again, the same it is with life. Each time, you overcome something, the next challenge will be bigger, harder to overcome. But that's ok. Between fights, you walked a little further, become a little wiser, and even beefed up a bit; all of which has prepared you to fight this fight and emerge victorious once again.
To close, I just want to encourage you in saying when hard times come, embrace them. Those times are serving to cultivate in you the strength you will need to get where you are going, and to allow you to enjoy the fruits of your labor you finally enter the place of the prize.
