Something I like to remind myself often is that opposition is a part of life. It was Vox Day who first directed me to this quote by Marcus Aurelius”
“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting
with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and
selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or
evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its
nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the
culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow
creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore
none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is
degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he
and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or
the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against
Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.”[1]
Ultimately
what Aurelius says here is no different to what Jesus told us about when he said
that people would oppose us. Or what Paul told us about, when he said that
through many trials and tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God (Acts
14:22). This life will be full of opposition, and when one source of that
opposition fades, sooner, not later, but sooner, another one or more will present
itself. Sometimes more than one at a time.
This is
especially true if you are in leadership in any context. The more significant
your leadership is, that is the more people you lead, or the more people you
have responsibility for, the more varieties of opposition you will face. You
must not only be prepared to face it, you need to face it with an attitude that
says, “When I come out on the other side of this I will be an improved person because
God is using this to teach me something I need to know.” As much as we don’t enjoy
them, trials are good for us, and they are used by God to refine us and grow in us
maturity.
Some leaders
give up in the midst of the trial and they never actually get a chance to learn
what it was that God was teaching them. This we must be determined not to do. The
only way to have a life free of trials and tribulations would be to already be
perfect in your being and in your role. Jesus was perfect in his being, but he
needed to be perfected in his role (Heb. 5:8-10). So even the most perfect
person who ever lived faced trials. Trials are God’s way of telling us that we
have something he wants to teach us, or something he wants us to overcome, or
something he wants build into us that we did not already have.
So, instead
of praying that the trials would go away, ask God to help you to learn what it
is that he wants to teach you quickly. You can begin to face them with a degree
of stoicism like Aurelius, but that is not enough for true maturity to begin to
set in. You need to know more than just that you will face trials because
people will oppose you for one reason or another. You need to also know that
you will face trials because you have a good God who wants to teach you and
make you more like him (1 Peter 1, Romans 8, Heb. 12).
You will
face opposition, make the best of it you can by learning what you did not
already know before that trial came along.
List of References
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/290880-begin-each-day-by-telling-yourself-today-i-shall-be
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