Is This Your Lowest Point?

Kai Alfonso in Tips and Advices

May 31, 2020 • 3 min Read

A friend called me one night and enumerated things that were happening to her at that moment. She went on a litany and eventually ended up with a heavy sigh…

“I am at the lowest point in my life so far —financially, emotionally, spiritually. How am I going to deal with this, much more survive?” She asked me.

It seems everybody knows this “point” in our lives — the lowest point or the going down — when our minds seem too numb because of overthinking and most of the time we space out. We try our best not to go down that point. It’s the upward we all long for, up the corporate ladder or up where we all belong or up there where everyone adores us. We throw everything in just so we see ourselves going up.

Up where?

This reality about life and its ups and downs, the happy and sad, the struggles and comfort, the abundance and scarcity, the good and bad, the sickness and health, is in itself a gift. How to fathom the mystery of this gift is to live with it until life presents the answers somehow and our existence becomes its own reward.

Nobody wants to be at their lowest point when all there is to be thankful for is the freedom to breathe — and no more! This is the very same gift that God has given us, to be alive. So I guess we should start there.

Breathe in God’s love and grace, and breathe out gratitude whether the road goes up or down. However little courage, love, patience, and strength we have, we need to trust Him to multiply what there is so little in us to sustain our weary souls.

I told my friend that it was at that point where she felt all her efforts seemed wasted, when every door was closed, where there were no answers to all her pleas but only a deafening silence that she had to put one step after another after another. If the road is going down then she should accept it. She should feel the place, be aware, understand the feeling, adapt, and see the people she should meet.

This is where down is. This is where humility resides. It is a place where you get comfortable seeing your weaknesses, your flaws, your inabilities, and inadequacies, face to face, and eye to eye. This is where you confront the stigmas of past errors and the mistakes that hound and wound the soul. This is where you shed the tears accepting the bitterness of failure and your own frailty. A bloodless battlefield where you need to come out triumphant.

But what if this down place is where you should be right now, at this very moment? This could be the center of your existence, not elsewhere. Would looking back at your supposed lowest point and looking forward to something different somehow allow a glimpse of the highest peak, where success is?

We all pass the same road but we seldom pay attention to the extraordinary sights along the way because we have bigger ambitions far ahead. We will always be in the lowest point because we tend to look to that farthest point that we’d rather be in and, in the process, we overlook the beauty around us. 

I told my friend: “Consider where you are right now. Take a look at what’s there around you. You may find the springboard to your greater self. This is where your life is, right now. Not in the past, not in the future, but now.”

What about you?