Crisis points, inflection points, points of major change.  They aren’t bad, even though they may be uncomfortable.  Often, they are uncomfortable.  Think of starting a new habit with your body – a stretch, jogging, or climbing a hill.  Your body is going to speak to you and let you know that this is out of character, and difficult.  Your body is going to warn you to check it out and make sure you want to go ahead with it.  And if you evaluate it, and decide that it has value and merit, you go ahead with it.  Sometimes we don’t get a choice about whether a change is coming – like in times of crisis.  We have to “climb the hill” – one way or another.  But we always a get a choice about how we climb.  How we choose to speak and think about it are in our control.  We can tell the story as if this is the worst hill that ever came along, and it will ruin our lives.  Or we can tell the story as if this hill is hard and difficult and painful, but we know we’ll get through it in a meaningful way.  We know that we will learn something and grow.  We have that capacity as adults.  If no one modeled that for us, then we didn’t have that capacity as children.  But life is always presenting us with opportunities to grow up those young parts of ourselves.  The crisis points and hills are redundancies built in to allow us to learn this time, what we may not have been able to learn before.  Today, I will find hope in the opportunity to grow to my fullest potential by courageously facing the hills.