Find Strength from Your Bad Past

Life is simply unpredictable … you just don’t know what it will throw at you.  What will happen to you should life hit you with adversity? Did you know that Stephen Colbert, the well-known comedian, actor, and TV host, had a bad past? 

Stephen has his own version of 911.  On September 11, when Stephen was just ten years old, the plane that he, his father and two brothers boarded crash landed in Charlotte, North Carolina, killing Stephen’s father and his brothers.  Stephen was among the ten survivors of that ill-fated plan ride. 

That bad past haunted the early years of Stephen’s life.  As a child he internalized the pain of the experience. In an interview with Oprah, he said that the bad past became part of his identity.  It was something lodged deep inside him that he feels no one else could fully comprehend. During his freshman year in college, he lost weight at an alarming rate because of his depression.

So you might say that probably Stephen chose to become a comedian to hide his pain.  Quite the contrary; he said he became a comedian because he was able to learn to see pain as a blessing.  According to him, pain taught him to know joy, to draw strength from love and to cherish what truly matters in life.

Joy is not the same as happiness.  Happiness is a mood, dependent on circumstance.  Joy is an enduring quality shaped by choice.  Stephen confessed, “Joy can be hard.” It is difficult but possible to have this state of mind.  Stephen decided to view life as comedy rather than as tragedy.  He searches for life’s humor and looks for laughter in every situation.  He keeps a card on his desk “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.”

Stephen drew strength from his mother’s love.  His mom taught him to be grateful for his life no matter what life throws at him.  He said, “What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not [the absence of] pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. That’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so.”

Cherish what truly matters in life.  Your being alive is an opportunity to turn the tide around – to correct the bad past, to learn from the bad experience and have a brighter future.  Only you have the right to make a choice on what you want to do with this opportunity.  You need to embrace optimism but at the same time realize that optimism will not automatically change your present situation. Optimism is not like “the Force” in Star Wars that magically bends the laws of nature.  However, optimism will change your attitude and outlook. Optimism will make you face life with a predisposition to actively look for, believe, and anticipate the best possible outcome in every situation --this is what truly matters in life.  This will help you find strength from your bad past.

It is said that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” That is not the case in life.  Most often bad experiences leave us angry, confused, hurt, or depressed. Bad past threatens to make us weak.  It’s not the bad past itself—but your response to bad past—that can strengthen you. Bad past doesn’t necessarily make you stronger, but it is guaranteed to change you. It’s up to you to you find strength from your bad past or wallow in pure frustration and depression.