You’re stronger than you think you are. As my husband’s late wife was dying of cancer, he often thought of how he would cope with her eventual death when it finally happened. At the time, he wasn’t sure he would survive it. His dark thoughts of making funeral and burial plans for the love of his life were soon realized, however, and although he numbly attended to the details of her passing and the emotional carnage of her loss, he did survive.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I’m not sure who first quoted these infamous words of wisdom, but whoever it was, he/she was correct. Remember how nervous and insecure you felt the first time you ever gave a speech? Or delivered your first baby? Or went on your first date? You may have thought you’d just die. But you got through all of these scenarios with courage. The next time you spoke to a crowd, or birthed a baby, or took the homecoming queen out to dinner, you weren’t as afraid. Accept what you cannot change. For my husband, the diagnosis of his late wife’s terminal cancer was not something he wanted to accept. So he went out to pore over the information about the disease. Had he accepted the doctors’ grim but verifiable declarations that they had exhausted all means available to reverse her cancer or keep it from killing her, my husband might not have felt so guilty about using up the last hours of his late wife’s life with meticulous and unrelenting research. Hope is a beautiful thing. It gives us peace and strength, and keeps us going when all seems lost. Accepting what you cannot change doesn’t mean you have given up on hope.

I have learned that by accepting what I cannot change, I can focus on what IS possible, not on what is not. — wow4u.com (concluded)