Broken Hands

My nighttime routine is a long and tedious one; something that takes great will power to continue to do. I am beset with hand lesions that impede my ability to do manual labor with my hands often. These hand lesions require me to soak, scrub, and apply medicine to them every night. This threefold task is not pleasant and is often painful, but I know I must do it if I ever want the lesions to clear up.

There was a time when I blamed three people for my problems; God, my parents, and my caretakers (e.g. doctors). God for creating me and allowing me to suffer, my parents for giving birth to me and allowing me to take a breath of this foul world, and doctors for not being able to fix me and assuage my pain. In this world of blame I turned upon those who loved me and became unwilling to do my part in my healing, because I knew it would never fix the problems.

George Bernard Shaw, the great writer of the classic play Pygmalion, said quite aptly that "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." We cannot truly be free until we realize that the only one responsible for our circumstances and our lives are us. It is true that we do not have complete control over our environments, but what we do with our environment shapes what our environment does with us. If I spend my life angry at others for an environment that no person has control over, then all I do is create an angry environment.   

St. Augustine once said "work as if it were up to you, pray as if it were up to God." God gives us this moment to live in and he gives us a choice we can either move forward positively or we can move backward negatively, we can apply the medicine to the lesions or we can go to sleep early because it feels good. We must remember this, though, when we decide to act negatively: if we do not like where we are and we do nothing to change it, it is only our fault that we remain in an unpleasant circumstance.