It’s easy to stand tall when things go well…when an abundance of good fortune lines your pockets and favorable winds fill your sails.
It is much harder to stand firm against adversity. Against ill tidings and the storms of life.
There is a wood surrounding my home. It isn’t much, just a tiny collection of tall, skinny trees. The kind that look like a good shove would do them in. In the spring and summer months, those trees are lush…Full of deep, velvety colors…emerald….goldenrod….and fire. These trees sit silently and patiently, basking in an abundance of pale sunlight and the fresh water of a recent rainshower.
Those days are offset by times where the life of those trees is challenged by Nature itself. Gale-force winds. Thunderstorms. Snow. Ice. Sleet. Hail. Hurricanes. The world throws everything it has at those trees and…yet…still they stand. Tall. Firm. Proud.
It has to be this way with us.
Bask in abundance.
Stand firm in the gale.
Do so, in both cases, with the strength and patience of a tree.
Matt Hardman 