Recently I asked my friends on Facebook to tell me what they think God wants them to know about themselves today. I got some great responses and will be working on an article for that topic this week. One of the responses has stayed with me. My friend Tammy Cox said, "I'm doing better than I think I am." Her comment reminded me of a story I love. (By the way if you know where it comes from, please let me know. Someone told me once, but I can't remember).
A group of kids were in a community dive team. Each week they would meet on their designated day to practice their dives. They would work on keeping their body perfectly straight and entering the pool with the least amount of splash. They wanted to have that perfect dive. Many of the kids had their own pools at home and would continue to practice their dives throughout the week. However, there was one boy on the team who didn't have a pool and couldn't practice any more than that one day a week. His dives were not as perfect as the other boys. Often he would make the biggest splash.
One day the team went to a local meet to show off their diving skills and hopefully win some awards. Each kid did their best and in the end the one boy who did not own a pool won. When the other kids found that out, they were very upset and went to their coaches and the judges to find out why. The simple answer was the degree of difficulty. The other kids dives were almost perfect, but they were not as challenging as this boy's dives. He always did the most difficult dives and so his dives were always worth more points.
You see in life we do not always see or know the difficulties that others face, but our Heavenly Father does. He knows us so well and even though we may feel like we are doing better than someone else, we have no idea. We don't know their degree of difficulty. We should never judge others. Along those same lines, we are doing so much better than we think we are because we don't always account for our degree of difficulty. We are expecting perfection, when sometimes life becomes so difficult that surviving each moment is a real feat of strength.
Please remember that you are doing better than you think you are and so are the people around you. We need more love and acceptance in this world and a whole lot less judgement.
Along those same lines I guess I should update friends and family about my own small degree of difficulty - my infertility journey. It is not something I love to talk about because it is a greatly disappointing part of my life. No amount of hard work or effort can change this aspect of my life. Anyways, I am still very much not pregnant. I have only been able to try Clomid 2 out of the last 5 months because my husband is away for work a lot. The rest of the year does not look very promising for the same reason and frankly this has depressed me more than I care to admit.
