Years ago I began to take notice of the movement of the stock market every morning in the news. If it moved very little, I started my day feeling secure. (Mind you I didn’t have any money invested in it and even if I did, I didn’t understand how it worked), but if the market made a huge jump, I felt happier. If it made a huge fall, I felt fearful. For some reason I thought the state of the stock market indicated the level of security I felt in my world. I would almost urge that market to creep upward everyday to make me feel better.
Then one day I realized something. The stock market cannot keep going upward everyday. Nothing keeps moving in an upward direction, without retreating and then moving upward again. I finally relaxed and didn’t let a fall in the Dow insight fear in my heart and my day. I finally understood what was meant by winning in the market only if you stayed in it for the long haul. In the years since I have been paying attention to it I’ve seen it go from 12,000 down to 8. I’ve seen it rise from 8,000 back up to twelve. You can only imagine my joy I felt last week when it 13,000 for the first time since I’ve been watching it. Today it fell over 200. In the past a fluctuation like that would have scared me. Not anymore. Since finally realizing it can keep going in an upward direction forever, even that day it fell 600 points I stayed pretty calm.
Spending all this time studying a market that was only measuring fear and security, and not a penny of my money, caused me to look around at the rest of how life mimics the stock market. Winter doesn’t keep getting colder. It eventually turns to summer. Summer doesn’t keep getting hotter. It eventually turns to spring. The perilous times in life eventually turn to joyful times. Joyful times eventually turn back into perilous times. Nothing stays the same. Nothing, like the market, keeps moving in one direction forever. Everything moves in a cycle – back and forth, up and down, positive to negative.
Now when I struggle with difficulties life presents, I find security in what learned from the market. How funny is it that I spent years learning this in the stock market and forgot God wrote it down for us in Ecclesiastes 3:1,15.
“A Time For Everything. For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven…..What is happening now, has happened before, and what will happen in the future has happened before, because God makes the same things happen over and over again.”
So now, when trouble comes, I try to remember: everything works out in the end, and if it hasn’t worked out yet, then it isn’t the end.
And so, as another day goes by, I have become aware that all of life moves in a cycle, and…I have written.
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