There is power in just weathering the storm. Hold on.

In my last post, I talked about how the Rise Podcast championed owning your struggles and looking beyond the adversity. Typically, we will find that there is a peace and an upside just on the other side of the mountain.

As helpful as that it is, it is not always easy to look up and power through, and in fact, sometimes, it is hard to power through the struggle. Sometimes, the path is so hard or challenging that not only do we struggle to take a step forward, but we struggle to not take three steps back. In these times, there is only one thing we can do:

Hold On.

I firmly believe that most things in life are, in fact, within our control. When in the midst of a storm, we can likely find our way through if we look towards the solution instead of the problem. But, sometimes things are out of our hands, and sometimes those things are strong. When that happens, the best we can do is batter the hatches and simple weather the storm.

My little girl is 4 months old now (soon to be 5 months, but who's counting?). We had finally reached a point where she was sleeping from about 9:00 p.m. until about 3:00 a.m. She would then wake up, eat, and go right back to sleep until about 6:00 a.m. when I got up. We had a solid week or more of this blissful stage which made us feel like we were finally on our way towards feeling normal again.

She had other plans.

Suddenly, the last several days, we fell right off the cliff. Falling asleep at 9:00 p.m. led to waking up between 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. She goes back to sleep easily, but guess what? We are up again at 2:00, then 3:00, then 4:30, then again at 5:30. We are at the point that we try cuddling, feeding, rocking, pretty much anything we can think of...it has not helped. At this point, we are tired, frustrated, and just running out of patience.

Then, I realized that we were looking at this all wrong.

We kept trying everything in hopes that it would make a difference, but it didn't. We kept getting frusrated with her, but why? Somethings really are outside of our control. We could try everything under the sun, but it likely wouldn't make a difference. We could keep losing our patience with her, but it wouldn't accomplish anything. Her sleeping is out of our control, and quite honestly, it is out of hers. She doesn't know why she cannot sleep and neither do we. She cannot make herself sleep any better and neither can we. It is a situation we are stuck in, but it is only temporary.

We will all find ourselves in the midst of a storm that we feel we cannot escape. Much like our sleepless nights with her, you may not see the end in sight. The worst part of it all is you may feel powerless to change the situation, and sometimes, you may not have the power to simply pull out of it. However, there is power in simply hanging on. The struggles you face today or tomorrow will not last forever, and if you feel like you don't have the power to control the storm, I can assure you that you do have the power to weather it.

Be patient, stay calm, and simply, hold on.