This recession is sneaky.
Not content to rob the country financially, this recession aims to nab our creativity. The gift of our ingenuity is the real prize this recession season seeks. The media reports about the lingering misery of the nation's financial loss, but the news shrouds the most lethal weapon -- the underlying lie that we can't get beyond this recession.
Chaos always attempts to trample the resilient order within human beings, that part of us that says: "Wait a minute! The last time I faced this, it actually turned out OK..." or "Whoa! Remember how I actually achieved more after I lost so much?"
When we give up, when we freeze in place because of chronic problems and overwhelming odds, chaos wins.
If you're out of work, you have time to think. If you want to quit a job you're clinging to because it keeps the lights on and that's about it, take time to think. Great minds seize the freedom to conceive dreams and visions and hopes even when their lives are constrained. Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about a Soviet labor camp touched me when I read it in high school because of the gritty survival it depicted. And I'm still amazed by Paul, who wrote inspired words to his friends in Philippi while under what traditional scholarship says was captivity in Rome.
I have not faced a Soviet labor camp or house arrest, but stories like these and the recession itself have taught me this: Chaos may limit circumstances, but chaos can't capture my spirit unless I submit to it.
Because of this recession, much has been lost, but much more is to be gained. The American Express card may be gone, but because of creative thinking during this recession, you may reach the Dave Ramsey sweet spot where you resist all plastic. The house may be gone, but its loss may drive you to build a business that builds you a new one, not to mention houses for others.
What we do now, what we create when we fight worry with work, what we reinvent ourselves to be despite the financial ashes -- will determine how luminously we emerge when this sly recession passes.
Judy Howard Ellis
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