By Dina Aldabbagh

“Woe to me because of my injury!”…Yet I say to myself, “This is my sickness, and I must endure it” (Jeremiah 10:19 NIV).

We all have our things. We all have some area in our life that, even if not horrible, is just not quite where we want it to be. This sore spot can pain us so deeply. It can take over our minds and convince us that we are truly going through the deepest of anguish. It can be all we focus on, to the point that our eyes see nothing else except the lack of this desire, and the suffering it causes. 

It’s a vicious cycle, this sore spot. We dwell on it, so it is the only thing we can pay attention to…but it’s all we pay attention to, so we feel like we must dwell on it. “How can I ignore it?…When it’s so loud in my face?” This unfulfilled desire or problem feels like it’s 6 inches in front of your eyes — like you open them up in the morning and it’s the first image you see. Like you go to bed at night, and while your eyes are closed, its looming presence is all you can feel. It’s right there, even if you’re not looking at it. It feels like a constant threat in your field, like at any moment it might finally destroy you. Whether you see it or not, you always feel it.

Our problems do this to us. They don’t just serve as imagery or symbolism, but they literally invade our nervous systems to the point that we feel like we cannot escape them — they have breached the barriers. The danger of their threat permeates our entire bodies. We feel it as pressure, anxiety, fear, tightness, or pain. The problem overtakes us, until we are no longer separate from it, where there is no safe space from the problem.

This is how it feels. And every human being must know this experience at some point in their life, at least once — while most unfortunately experience it chronically over decades. And if I could tell you what is the root cause of all of these problems, I would not say the problem itself — I would say it’s the denial of its existence and the acceptance of its reality. The attempted escape of the original problem causes all the other problems. The intention to “solve” or deny or escape the problem one faces is what causes a sort of dissonance with reality that makes a person twist inside their own mind until they shrivel up inside their own skin, since no space is safe.

The denial of what you are dealing with is the problem, not the problem itself. The problem is just a thing. An event. A happenstance. But the approach of “this cannot be happening” gives that problem power. It registers it as a threat that it is not. And as such, it then convinces you that you are unsafe, when you actually aren’t.

The truth of life is we will all have something. Every person will face something. “Woe to me because of my injury!”…Yet I say to myself, “This is my sickness, and I must endure it” (Jeremiah 10:19 NIV). You have your personal injury, and I have mine. We all have the things that make life a bit harder to live. We all have the things that add gas to our fears and make us believe things are worse than they are. We all have our own personal pain points — the thing that is easy for so many, but not us. But we all must endure it. There is no other choice. It’s what you were charged with. Deal with it.

If you went into a room of even just 20 people, and everyone could write their worst problem down and put it into a hat, would you risk grabbing one or simply keeping yours? Is your worst problem something you would risk trading with someone else’s? 

We all think our problem is the worst in the world, but that is so far from true. It’s just the worst problem for us — for our perspective, in our current worldview. Consider yourself lucky that your worldview of problems is not as large as some. There are people in this world facing things that would crush you just to imagine for yourself.

This is not to invalidate your problems. I understand, it pains you just the same. Just because other people have problems doesn’t make yours worthless. However, let it give you perspective. This problem of yours is your injury to endure, and you don’t want someone else’s. You really don’t. Here’s the perspective I’m encouraging: if you knew what problems the people who lived and worked around you were dealing with, you would gladly, cheerfully take yours. You would walk around with a smile on your face saying, “This is the best problem I could have.” 

I learned this humbling lesson for myself, too. And it is humbling. You go from feeling so “woe is me” to gaining just a bit of perspective and realizing, “…Woah, I feel spoiled. I’m going to shut up because things can be so much worse.” When I had just moved to Spain, I was having a heck of a hard time finding a place to live. For five weeks, I was homeless, essentially. At least, in the way that I didn’t have a home. 

I never went without a bed to sleep in, but the process was laborious and emotionally taxing. I was hotel/hostel/airbnb hopping with 4 bags for a couple weeks until I finally landed at a hostel I stayed at for the remaining three weeks. Even there, I had to move from room to room with all my things while availability shifted. My home for weeks was shared rooms of 6 people — which comes with its own fun experiences. The smells were unique, but the sounds were maybe most fun of all, as my many nights being woken up to the snores of a woman who struggled with sleep apnea would attest. Yes, I did have noise cancelling earbuds on. Unfortunately, they only worked so much.

Essentially, this experience was emotionally very difficult. Not only was it hard being in these shared rooms, but there were also no leads to give me hope. I couldn’t find an apartment. Everyone I knew was one by one finding their home, and nothing I found was panning out. The hardest part was not seeing an end in sight. In these moments, it is hard to imagine you won’t feel like this forever. 

At nearly the end of my five week stint as a semi-homeless girl, I experienced a couple of things that both opened my perspective and deeply humbled me. A friend of mine was telling me about her journey getting to Madrid. I had only known her since we both arrived in Spain, and she was having a pretty easy go at the beginning of our time there. She found an apartment immediately and had great roommates — all a person could ask for. Then, as she and I spoke more, she told me about the process of even getting out to Spain at all.

This friend had to get a crucial surgery before moving out, and had obstacle after obstacle getting the surgery done before moving. As this program in Spain was a contracted time period, if she couldn’t get the surgery in time, she would have to likely forgo her spot in the program. She ended up finally getting the surgery just three weeks before moving to Spain.

Mind you, I was in the middle of my marathon training. I was training to run a marathon. Yes, I was staying in a hostel with 5 other people in a shared room, but I was healthy enough to literally train for a marathon. Yes, my friend found an apartment quickly, but she had a hellish number of months even trying to get out to Spain, was dealing with physical ailments and pain, and was still in the healing process after a huge surgery. I had no need for surgeries, I was just staying in an uncomfortable, but temporary, shelter. That was my problem.

To further deepen the point for me, I had another experience at my work. I worked at an elementary school at the time, and one day was asked to go to the infant sector of the school to do some work — an area I usually wasn’t assigned to. These were babies, 3-5 years old. As I walked through the hallway, the class of 3-year olds walked by me, and I saw a little, tiny baby with a fresh eyepatch over her eye, post-procedure. A 3-year old. A 3-year old had to get eye surgery, and yet here I was complaining about having a bed to sleep in and food to eat and a shower to clean myself with just because it wasn’t the one I wanted. How humbling.

Because truly I tell you, I never did experience actual pain. It was uncomfortable, but I thankfully had enough funds to even pay to stay in a hostel (& co.) for five weeks. I had enough to be able to eat out for every meal for five weeks. That’s huge. That’s what I had, and now I say what I didn’t have: surgery, a painful time getting out to Spain, illness, or months of stress fighting back and forth with an insurance company to get a critical surgery. On the contrary, I was healthy enough to run a marathon.

Sometimes we think our problems are so big, but we wouldn’t actually trade them for the world. “If this is the worst of my problems,” we learn, “I will endure it with a smile on my face. Rather than dwell, I will instead thank God for making this the worst of my problems.” 

As I reflected on these two experiences, I realized that I had the most important thing for a life: health. As I said, not only was I not facing any problems, but I was actually actively able to be more and more healthy; I was in the middle of training for an event that requires a high level of health. I realized that I would take my current problems any day because I was spared of the worst. Actually, I never even faced true adversity during that time. Every day during those five weeks, I had food, I had a bed, I had a shower, I had clothes and money to buy what I needed, and I had health. The real adversity was the battle in my mind.

That was the true affliction I faced during that time. No, not anything that actually took away my physical safety, rather something totally mental. The battle was opening my eyes and only seeing my problem. The battle was closing my eyes and feeling the conceived weight of said problem putting pressure on me. The battle was not against anything tangible, rather the intangible. 

It was a mindset issue during that time, not a safety issue. But I only focused on my problem, so that’s all I saw. It took seeing other people’s problems to finally understand how much I was truly being protected from.

It’s a journey to get yourself out of that loop if you’re in it, but it is possible, and the way out is through widening the lens. While it humbled me to see how ungrateful I was being, through bearing witness to what others went through, that’s nothing compared to staying in the negativity loop. 

I do not say this to invalidate the pain you feel, but I urge you to take a look outside of yourself, and maybe you might just realize that your problem is not that bad. When all you’re looking at is that one, big problem you have, you lose sight of all the good things in your life as well. 

It’s so easy to take it for granted if it’s not actively causing you pain — but the lack of pain calling your attention to it doesn’t mean it’s not worth paying attention to. Instead of looking at all the things that are “wrong,” look at all the things that are right. There is so much good in your life, if you allow yourself to look at that.