“If you want God to use you greatly, you must be willing to walk with a limp the rest of your life, because God uses weak people.” ~Rick Warren

“Your biggest weakness is just your greatest strength turned up too loud.”  

“In the end, some of your greatest pains become your greatest strengths.” ~Drew Barrymore

Confession time.

I’ve always felt that one of my greatest weaknesses was my tendency to be somewhat romantically-challenged. I mean, let’s face it: I haven’t had the best of luck in the area of love. My romantic “roads not taken” include a wide array of un-dateable and emotionally unavailable guys. I’ve managed to rack up one award winning non relationship (if that makes sense)– drunken text messages at 3:00 a.m., dates where men have done nothing but talk about themselves, cry about old relationships, men who made home desserts and tried to get me to eat them, one that seemed normal until after the second or third date, when he tried to sell me drugs. I even once dated a man who proclaimed his love to me one week, only to stop speaking to me the next. (Talk about mixed signals.) And still another who I made the mistake of recycling several times over the course of a 2-year span, always thinking “This time he’s changed!” who found new and creative ways to grab my attention for his own selfish reasons to then stand me up over and over. (Thus spawning one of my favorite quotes: “Don’t recycle your exes. It’s bad for the environment!”)

My point to this trip down Brooke’s Memory Lane is this: I could very easily look at my love life as tragic.. which believe me I have hung my head down for days after some of these situations…but I now choose to look at it, instead, as the best thing that could have ever happened for me.

Hear me on this; If I hadn’t had so many insanely off-the-wall and unsuccessful experiences in love AND in life – I wouldn’t have the words of wisdom that I bring to you, the result of my many hard fought battles in the game of love. I might not have found love (yet), but I DID find my purpose thru all of this. All because I choose now to flip the script and look at my biggest weakness…as my biggest uniqueness. Whoo- it has taken me a long time to say that or get to that point .. finally.

Your weaknesses in my mind or your flaws will always, always point you to your cause. I’m not saying you deserve to have to endure pain or that your situation isn’t difficult, and horrible, and heartbreaking. Believe me my heart has been broken in love and in life situations. What I’m saying is that in the midst of that struggle lies your ability to help someone else through theirs. The burden you carry gives you the ability to help lighten the load for others. And your darkest, most pitch black night allows you to point others to their light. Don’t deny your weakness…embrace it as your uniqueness. I now realize that it gives you a circle of influence and a platform that you would never have otherwise. Don’t run from it – run toward it. So to all the guys that told me my imperfections make me WEAK, I tell them: “Nope. They make me UNIQUE.”

True forgiveness is when you can say, “Thank you for that experience.” ~Oprah

Love can be crazy, and unexplainable, and sometimes unforgiving in its relentless pursuit to grab hold of your heart and squeeze until you’re sure you can’t take one moment more of the exquisite pain; but at the end of the day, when the turmoil and the madness and the passion fades, and you’re left facing only the reflection of yourself in the mirror, when you get down to the heart of the matter, it really is all about forgiveness. Forgiving others for being careless with your heart…forgiving yourself for the mistakes you’ve made…forgiving the past for its unrelenting need to drag you into a future without the person who once stood by your side. It’s all about forgiveness, and the ability to let go of those that are no longer there. If they were meant to be there, they would be.

Despite the blows to the pride and the blows to the heart and the very human need to shield yourself from even one second of pain…the pain reminds you that you’re real, and it reminds you that it’s time to move on, and it reminds you to let go of the something or the someone that no longer needs you. Their part in the story is through…the curtain has closed…the screen has faded to black…but when you look closer, you will see that underneath it all is a glimmer of hope, and love, and truth, and happiness…just waiting to be discovered. As much as they might have hurt you, they also helped you, by showing you how strong you REALLY are. Thank them. For changing you, strengthening you, showing you the way…even if they didn’t stay. Then as my dear friend says, “keep it moving”

“When it rains it pours. Maybe the art of life is to convert tough times to great experiences: we can choose to hate the rain or dance in it.” ~Joan Marques

In the spirit of clearness, I will be completely honest: I have been going through some tough times lately. Due to the overall toughness of what my family is going through, the busyness of my schedule and the intensity of the daily grind, I haven’t been taking the greatest care of myself, and over the past few weeks, it has started to catch up with me in numerous ways. Anxiety, a cough that has dragged on for a month, totally spacing on friends etc. etc. The list goes on and on. So where’s the silver lining in all this, you ask? IS there a silver lining to tough times?

Absolutely.

Tough times tend to teach you what’s REALLY important. Tough times help you re-prioritize your life; giving the right things more room and giving the wrong things the boot. Tough times teach you who your real friends are. Tough times show you how much you really didn’t know your own strength. Tough times remind you of how lucky you are to have the umbrella of faith to top you when the trials of life try and stop you. Tough times help you see the importance of self-love and self-care. Tough times stop you in your tracks, detouring you or rerouting you a different way, all together. Tough times shake you, but then they make you. Just like the butterfly beats himself silly in the process of emerging from his cocoon, and the oyster endures great pain to produce its tiny but shiny pearl – it takes big trials to produce bigger treasures. So in facing these tought times today I can realize that there is a miracle on the way.         

Hanging tough!!