Ever feel like you’re starring in your own horror movie?
The plot twists and turns in life can defy logic. I’d feel sorry for myself if it weren’t for the fact that everyone is living the same movie
, in one way or another. Sure, there are stretches when everything is going along just fine, but then, out-of-the-blue, it’s horror movie time.
Things start innocently enough, with a nice, friendly, good person getting blindsided by a terrible crisis that makes no sense, but then the drama starts to build. One problem takes you on a detour down a path of seemingly endless dilemmas, heartbreaking, scary challenges, one after another, barely making it through one problem before getting hit with 2 more, then another and another, exhausted, thinking you can’t go on another minute, never knowing what to do, yet always finding a way to survive to meet the next hurdle. That’s the thing about a really great horror movie, though. They teach you that no matter how bad things get, you have to keep going, just a few minutes more.
Have you seen the movie, Steven King’s The Mist? (Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t and think you might want to, skip the rest of this paragraph!) A whole town is swallowed up in a blinding mist in which there are these mysterious gigantic insect-like monsters from another dimension (thanks to a screwed up military experiment) ripping townsfolk limb from limb. At the end, this guy and his young son, an old couple, and a young woman have gone through hell to survive, only to end up stranded in the path of these monsters in the mist with nothing to help them but a pistol and 4 bullets. Death by these monsters is too gruesome to face, and you hear the growls and screeches as the monsters are closing in on them. So, out of love, the guy shoots everyone–his kid, the woman, the couple–to mercifully spare them being eaten alive, leaving only him to face this gruesome fate that certainly awaits him in mere minutes. But wouldn’t you know it? Just when he thinks he’s about to be turned into extra-terrestial antipasti, the mist suddenly clears and military forces appear, killing the monsters as they go, with a truck filled with survivors in tow. Ahhhhhhhhh!!!! He didn’t have to shoot anybody! They all could have lived to be rescued!!! If only they had waited just a few minutes more.
The moral of the story–never give up hope. When nothing else is there to help you, all you’ve got left to turn to is hope. Despite all the terrifying problems in the movie, it was their giving up hope that did them in at the end. What a wicked metaphor for life!
It’d be great if we could write our own stories, but all we can really do is improvise. No matter what hardships you face and what life takes from you, only you can take away hope. To be clear, having hope doesn’t mean just sitting around waiting to be rescued. You’ll surely be eaten up by the monsters lurking in the mist if you don’t keep moving. Hoping for things to get better isn’t what rescues you. Hope is that renewable energy source within your heart and spirit that fuels your efforts to survive until you can get to that which will rescue you.
You don’t know what monsters lie waiting for you in the mist
, but you don’t know what forces are on their way to rescue you, either. The problems are after you
, but so are the answers. Your job is to keep hope alive until you find your rescue. Hang on, just a few minutes more!
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