Rebuilding Your Broken World by Gordon MacDonald

Author:Gordon MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ADVERSITY AND FRUSTRATION

At other times I have written of a short period in our once-young lives when we lived in western Kansas. Then it was necessary for me to drive our inexpensive Volkswagen “beetle” to Denver twice a week for classes in graduate school. The 176-mile trip was straight westward, and I often encountered powerful headwinds that swooped across the plains from the Rocky Mountains.

Headwinds meant a very slow trip to Denver, and they meant, of course, a relatively fast trip back home. If the winds were powerful enough, I often had to drive most of the trip in second or third gear rather than the fourth gear normally used for cruising. The car was blown all over the road, but I always reached my destination.

Naturally, one could drive the distance in second or third gear, but it meant much slower speed, poor gasoline economy, and some wear and tear on the engine. And the wind gusts often came as a surprise and created dangerous driving conditions.

I came to see that we can begin to encounter certain headwinds in life that offer the same kind of challenges I experienced on the road to Denver. Instead of living in fourth gear, with an economy of motion and emotion, we find ourselves living in second or third gear: working harder to accomplish less. We can do it, but like my Volkswagen, the wear and tear and the slower speed of achievement will be our lot.

I think of such headwinds when I think of adversity and frustration, great sources of saturation and destabilization. When I use the word adversity, I’m thinking of our dealings with abrasive, unlikable, or unpleasable people. And when I speak of frustration, I’m thinking of tasks that seem to offer no fulfillment or satisfaction. These are second-and third-gear conditions: dangerous and time-consuming headwinds. I meet a lot of people who are living in second or third gear.

These will be no problem at all for those of us who do not let people get inside our skin or for those who enjoy a challenge and remain unflappable no matter what the degree of difficulty on the job.

When I first wrote this book,Harvey McKay’s book, Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive, was a hot title in the business section of bookstores. He’d produced an apt metaphor to describe workplace adversity. A shark can be a boss or manager in the workplace whose leadership style (if there is one at all) runs counter to the way we like to be motivated and evaluated. A shark can be a family member who makes our lives absolutely miserable: a mother who cannot be pleased or an uncle who incessantly whines and complains. Sharks can be nasty students. The list of potential sharks is long and scary.

The sharks wear us down. They consume large amounts of our mental time as we try to think through ways to defend ourselves, maybe even how to get back at them. Even if we get up every

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