{"id":2061,"date":"2022-10-19T09:39:50","date_gmt":"2022-10-19T13:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2061"},"modified":"2022-10-19T09:40:27","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T13:40:27","slug":"handle-hard-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/19\/handle-hard-better\/","title":{"rendered":"Handle Hard Better"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>.

Every day we have two choices.

We can hope that things will get easier.  Or we can handle life\u2019s hard things better. 

That\u2019s the perspective of Kara Lawson, one of this generation\u2019s most accomplished female basketball players.  Her resume includes 15 seasons as an All-Star shooting guard in the WNBA, including a league championship in 2005 with the Sacramento Monarchs.  She was a member of the US women\u2019s basketball team that won Olympic gold at Beijing in 2008.  She also helped break the NBA coaching gender barrier by serving as an assistant for the Boston Celtics in 2019, and for the past two years has been the head coach of the Duke Blue Devils women\u2019s basketball team. 

Lawson knows from experience that success doesn\u2019t come from waiting for things to get easier. 

\u201cIt never gets easier,\u201d she says.  Success is what happens when \u201cyou handle hard better.\u201d 

Her primary goal for her players is that they would become skilled at handling increasingly difficult circumstances.  \u201cThe second we see you handling hard stuff,\u201d she asks, \u201cwhat are we going to do?  We\u2019re going to make it harder.\u201d  That\u2019s because greatness comes from facing up to the myriad challenges of handling whatever comes next.

\u201cIf you have a meaningful pursuit in life,\u201d says Kara, \u201cit will never be easy.  People are waiting for the easy bus to come around.  [But the] easy bus never comes around.\u201d<\/em>

Check out<\/a> this brief clip of Kara delivering that very message to her team.

On the night before his death, Jesus was huddled with the men he had been coaching for something like three years.  His message was similar:  There\u2019s no getting around the fact that life is hard.  \u201cI have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.  In the world you will have tribulation.  But take heart; I have overcome the world\u201d (John 16:33). 

We can wait for life to get easier.  We can hope that one of these days work won\u2019t be so hard.  And our kids won\u2019t break our hearts.  And food prices will plunge.  And there won\u2019t be any upsetting news from Ukraine.  And our bodies will grow younger instead of older.

But life isn\u2019t going to get any easier.

Grounded by the conviction that Jesus is our never-failing source of peace, let\u2019s learn to handle hard better. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Every day we have two choices. We can hope that things will get easier.  Or we can handle life\u2019s hard things better.  That\u2019s the perspective of Kara Lawson, one of this generation\u2019s most accomplished female basketball players.  Her resume includes 15 seasons as an All-Star shooting guard in the WNBA, including… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[394,10],"class_list":["post-2061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-peace","tag-perseverance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2061"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2064,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2061\/revisions\/2064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}