The Gains of Challenges

Preface

Human nature gets attracted to positive forces and repelled by the negative. The
natural laws show us how we move towards areas of positive circumstances and are repelled by negative circumstances.
Without looking, a man jerks back his hand if he unknowingly touches a hot metal.
Animal and plant life is replete with such
phenomena. Plants are attracted to sources of light and move away from darkness. In some cases, when there are strong obstructions to the source of sunlight, a whole tree trunk can tilt to locate the light source or the direction of sunlight
in a desperate bid to stay connected and stay alive. This tilting or bending could take a long time to achieve. This is as it concerns plant, but not so with animals. Their response is faster and quicker to such adverse conditions and circumstances in their environment.
Thus from micro organisms to the larger
animals, we see a move away from adverse
environmental conditions; a withdrawal that in some cases may be so fast as to be followed, or hardly observed by the human eyes. Such adverse conditions are often viewed as negative; and most often people don’t ever imagine that anything good can be derived from them.
In life generally, negative circumstances are
often viewed in the light of the surface
impression, and rarely do people sit down to imagine the innumerable and immeasurable gains of such seeming negative situations.
Jesus, in answer to the question by the
religious leaders as to who sinned whether a man or his parents, concerning the man born blind, an obvious disability and in fact a negative health condition, said neither the man nor his parents sinned to necessitate that condition but that the essence is that the glory of God may be
made manifest.
What glory? You may ask. A man is disabled and as such turned a beggar and here comes Jesus talking about glory coming forth from disability. Yes, his disability, as it were, turned many to the faith, and made them believe in the
Messiah.
It sounds paradoxical, but the wisdom of
God says, “Count it all joy when you fall into temptations” James 1:2. Temptations here imply trials and challenges which in line with our context are adjudged negative. T h e wisest would not have charged us to count it all joy if there were no gains or benefits that can come from such situations.
It is a paradox, I suppose, but every negative situation or seemingly negative situation reveals or exposes some sort of beauty or something positive.
For the plant life you get some very unique
shapes from the tree trunks. Some trees are bent in such a way that you can practically lie on them when you go hunting or picnicking.
The negative circumstances get the animals
on the move.
The drying up of the grassland and the
changes in the flora in the popular, Serene Gethy Wild Life Park in Namibia at a certain time in the year gets the herbivorous animals migrating through some very dangerous terrain to get to greener pastures. This routine is seasonal and is called ‘masai nara’ in the local language. This creates a wonderful sight for the tourists. The migration takes them through some crocodile infested waters and large expanse of open grassland where they fall prey to the carnivorous animals. You may ask, what is the gain here? This movement and consequent loss of the lives of these animals create a balance and help sustain some animal lives. The movement
also provides the tourists with some wonderful scenes for which they return every year to witness, and this situation, though negative as it were, enhances the earnings of the host nation.
For man, we owe all of our inventions and
discoveries to the challenges posed by our ever changing environment and the need to keep pace with these changes and maintain a stable environment built on comfort and security.
Challenges get man out of his comfort zone and bring out the best in him, hence the cliché ‘necessity is the mother of inventions’. It is only the presence of a need or the actual realization of that need that propels the desire to work towards meeting such needs.
Once there is a need, there is always a
corresponding drive to meet those needs.
A critical look at needs will reveal an initial
presentation of challenges or negative
circumstances. Men went into the laboratories for researches when there was an overwhelming or dire need to find cure to so many hitherto incurable diseases. If the need had not arisen, those inventions would not have been made.
Human beings, from cradle to old age, are
spurred into action by the need to meet some challenges. A child starts making moves at crawling when it feels left out in the scheme of things within its environment. When the baby sees other people move about and get what they
want for themselves while he sits by and
watches, unconsciously the urge to move is birth in such a baby. As the baby grows, he starts making attempts at standing and walking when it is becoming obvious to him that the crawling is no longer fast enough to be part of the fun. The number of times such babies fall in their attempt to move faster will not deter them.
All of man’s advancements in life are
traceable to the challenges he is faced with.
In this piece the author is looking at the
challenges of life physically, spiritually and how they have helped man’s progress towards the fulfilment of his purpose in life as he walks in the will of God.