What if you took a flight to Paris, France and ended up in Lisbon, Portugal? Imagine you had made arrangements for a long stay in a comfortable home in Paris. Perhaps, you even had taken classes and learned some French. Now as you exit the airport you find yourself in Lisbon.  How would you feel at that moment?

I expect most of us would feel disappointment and frustration.  Isn’t this the way life feels sometimes?  We have goals of achieving an exceptional career or dreams of living in an amazing location.  Then life happens.  And sometimes life happens hard.

Unavoidable circumstances can derail even the best laid plans.  An economic issue can frustrate the progress of most endeavors. Is it any wonder the pursuit for better finances is a very common motivating factor? An unexpected health issue is another situation that can complicate achieving an objective.

When you find yourself in Lisbon and you planned for Paris, you have a few choices.  The prevailing wisdom is to adjust your expectations and make the best of the situation. You may find you actually like Lisbon very well and decide to stay there.  Another option is to seek help from others.  The worst option is to panic and become unable to function in a logical manner.

I would like to consider the cumulative effect of multiple Lisbon experiences.  Does it ever feel as if you are reluctant to get your hopes up? To press on towards some dream you have, because you have had too many disappointments in life?  I think the answer for many of us is: yes.

Oftentimes we learn to compromise our expectations because there is a certain level of pain involved when things don’t work out very well.  However, that shouldn’t be our primary outlook on life.  Of course, compromise is a valid approach for overcoming difficulties and allows us to keep moving forward.  But there are God given dreams we have that need to be nurtured and brought to fruition.

So what is a tool that we can use to keep our dreams alive?  I recommend the inspiration we can find in the prelude to the biblical story of David and Goliath.  Early in the story David tells the King of Israel, Saul, that he wants to fight the boisterous Goliath who has been heaping shame on the Israeli army.  Saul is astonished and tells the young David he is ill equipped to fight an accomplished military man like Goliath.

David’s response is where we can find a means to deal with life’s adversity.

But David said to Saul, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it.  Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God.  The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.” Saul said to David, “Go, and the Lord be with you.”

1 Samuel 17:34-37 New International Version (NIV)

David knew adversity very well. He tells Saul that as a shepherd he had experience with defeating a lion and a bear.  It is not often in our contemporary world that we have had to deal with dangerous wild animals trying to take away our livelihood or our health.  However, if we get past the part about the lion and the bear, we can appreciate that David was having a very bad day when his finances and health were at grave risk.

It is in this passage, that David reveals a remarkable tool that we can apply to the large obstacles that appear in our life.  David recalls the experience with the lion and bear. It wasn’t an easy battle — there was some hair pulling involved and offensive maneuvers, but the Lord helped him come out on the winning side.

In a similar way, we can remember the struggles in our life that were hard, but with God’s providence we prevailed through the adversity.  This can be useful when the obstacles in front of us are threatening and loom large.

Remember.  Don’t give up on your hopes and aspirations.  Be like David. Boldly meet your challenges and persevere to achieve your goals.