One thing we can be assured of is your life will be full of trouble. What I want to bring to you is a different perspective of viewing trouble and help you use trouble to grow, mature and make your life better through this process.

The end result I want you to get out of this blog is to give you three things that you can do when trouble comes into your life, and how you can use them to help you learn, grow, mature, be inspired and to create a better future; to tackle trouble with a greater clarity, confidence and peace of mind.

If we are not disciplined or have a process in mind, one of the first things that I can say about trouble is that when trouble comes we have a tendency to multiply our trouble. One of the three steps that I’m going to challenge you with is to:

• Write down your trouble – make it clear and specifically bring it down into a sentence or two. When you do that, you bring trouble down to the size where its manageable and you can break it down into parts that you can work with.
• The other thing is to make a choice in your own mind to learn from this Decide that you are going to get better, smarter, wiser, more mature, from trouble. That’s a huge thing. That’s a different mind.
• The third thing is this: we need to seek God when trouble comes. We need to listen and see what he says about trouble. We need to seek wise counsel about trouble – this might include trusted family members, friends or your pastor. Seeking God in prayer and in his word is a great place to do that, along with people that have wisdom and discernment that you trust.

As you do these three things what you are going to find is that there is going to be a transformation that’s going to happen in your life so that when trouble comes you are going to look at trouble from a different perspective.

• The first thing you are going to notice is that you are more ready to acknowledge what the trouble is in a concise way.
• You are going to summarize it in a sentence or two so you can pray about it, think about it, learn from it, look at it and isolate it.
• The third thing is to isolate the trouble from the rest of your life so it doesn’t become like a cancer and spread.
• Then you are going to choose to learn from it and then after you choose to learn from it you are going to grow. You’re going to get better. You’re going to get wiser. You’re going to be more productive in dealing with trouble in the future. That’s what’s exciting about this whole idea of trouble as our teacher.