It's Okay Now

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was one of my favorite movies growing up.  There is nothing quite like seeing a good kid strike it big and enter into every child’s dreamland… a factory full of everything that I wasn’t allowed to eat.  You know the story well, the little boy finds a golden ticket that takes him into his candy wonderland. By the end of the movie, Charlie has gone through challenges to his character. And like every good movie he’s still a hero at the end.

Where Is the Golden Ticket?

Most of my life I have been looking for my own version of that golden ticket.  Have you?  When I graduated high school, I needed the fastest ticket out of small town USA. When I graduated college, I needed the fastest answer to “my destiny’s call”.  When things started to get hard at work, I wanted the fastest ticket out of my job and into a new one.  And when I was tired of whatever “season” of life I found myself in, I needed a golden ticket out.  But my golden tickets rarely come…

I love golden tickets… They open doors for you that you’ve been begging to have opened. They give you this amazing high and you can tell that someone’s looking out for you.  But the thing is… when you have a golden ticket to a chocolate factory… at the end of the day, you’ve got a stomach ache and things just don’t look like they did at the beginning… Your pants fit a little snugger and you realize that even though it looked good… It was probably not a good idea.

Maybe the whole idea of a golden ticket is a farce.  Every time I’ve faced something hard and came out on the other side, I was able to emerge with more joy, more peace, more strength and more faith… Not a bad deal, but definitely no golden ticket in hand.

So maybe the question isn’t, “Where is the golden ticket?” Maybe the real question is, “What is it that I need to learn today, right where I am?”

Maybe living the hard times well is the best gift we can give our future.

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