Appreciation’s flipside

“You gotta experience the bad in order to appreciate the good, Dad” my daughter tells me. Smart kid.

A while back I went out of town for a few days and the chlorine levels in my pool dropped. The result was no chlorine, a nice warm summer, plenty of sunshine and . . . a green pool. Darn! I hate it when that happens. A gazillion chemicals later and finally a few days later it looked like something you’d want to swim in. Now we go outside and look at a nice blue pool with a little more appreciation. If we never had a rainy day, we wouldn’t appreciate the sunny ones.

My daughter has ended up with a bunch of goons in her class this year. I guess at 14 years old girls are not really at their most mature time of life, but it really doesn’t make her excited to head off to school this year (or so she says). But it makes her appreciate her mates from last year a little more now.

My last PA, was a trooper. Day after day she wandered in on the dot of 8.30am and beavered away doing the work until the stroke of 3.00pm and she was out-the-door. Reliable and accurate, that German really got the job done. I appreciated her, because I’ve had others who have failed to fire for various reasons.

The saying “There’s a silver lining to every cloud” is true but it I can’t stand it. Probably because people always use it when I’m wanting to wallow in self pity over something bad that has just happened.

I’ve noticed in business that its quite often the adversity, and problems and challenges that kick things into life, as we get creative, and work the issues through. We recently invested quite heavily into two Content Management Systems that ended up a total disaster, but as a result, we’ve ended up developing a far better long-term solution, with the potential to put Go Kiwi Internet way ahead on the map in our niche market.

As a human I want to grizzle and complain and blame something or someone for the waste time and money. As a manager though, I just use the resources I have around me, day by day, and I have come to appreciate the good things more as a result.

The Lord is a master at this - taking apparent adversity and turning it around for good. Scripture is repleat with examples of the devil twisting things around to undermine the Lord’s word, or intent. People mess up, screw up, charge off in their own directions, start with good intent and then get it all wrong, or just plain hate God outright and try to fight Him.

The amazing thing is that He is so accommodating, understanding and capable in such situations that its scary. I mean take Job for example. One minute he’s hurling insults around, and then the next he’s all humble and appreciative. Very real and wholesome.

Daniel got knocked around a little bit in his time and to put it simply when he was in deep shit doodoo, he still had the smarts to show appreciation where and when it was due:

I thank and praise you, O God of my fathers:
You have given me wisdom and power,
you have made known to me what we asked of you,
you have made known to us the dream of the king.”
Daniel 2:23

The VICTUS IN AMBITUS way is to recognise pain or adversity for what it is, but to then find that silver lining and to get onto appreciation - asap. Ahhhhh . . . .