Soul Survivor

Over the last year I read a book titled Deep Survival. It is not a Christian book but I read it during a time in my life when I was struggling to “survive.” The book was about people who survived in the wilderness or survived plane crashes and the lessons that one could learn from them. It dealt with the question, why did this person survive and that one didn’t?

What lessons came out of that study? Here are a few:
· Survivors turn anger and fear into focus – they get their attention on the matter at hand.
· Survivors perceive their situation correctly, make a plan, take correct action and when confronted with a changing environment, readily adapt.
· Survivors learned to use humor and laughter. Laughter stimulates an area of the brain that helps us temper negative emotions. This helps us manage fear.
· The survivor expects the world to keep changing and is asking the question: “What’s up?” Many times the world around us is changing and we are not taking in the new information. A survivor attends to the business of adapting to the changes in the environment and keeps themselves in balance.
· Survivors maintained a positive mental attitude – One survivor said: “Think good thoughts and you’ll be saved.” Many who died had apathy. Apathy led to complete deterioration.
· Helping someone else also enabled survivors to survive. Helping others takes you out of yourself and rise above your fears.
· The survivor made plans by setting small, manageable goals.
· Survival involves being familiar with pain. Another survivor wrote: “You have to practice hurting. There is no question about it … you have to learn a bunch of junk and accept it with a sense of humor.”
· Faith also played an important role in survival. It was discovered that survivors spent their lives building a core of strength that they pulled from in the moment of struggle.

I know that in the course of life we want to do more than just survive. I want to thrive. Yet, there are places where the journey we walk takes us into deep valleys. If we have been building up a core strength in our Lord and growing in Him, we will discover that we can not only survive, but thrive in the midst of the darkness.