Difficulty Settings

Many video games have difficulty settings, allowing you to choose how difficult the game is. If you want to challenge yourself, as I sometimes do, you can select harder difficulties to test and challenge your skill at playing the game. Or, if you don't want a challenge, you can select the easier modes and more easily explore the game world and enjoy the story, without having to hone your button-pressing skills.

Life doesn't really have that. It seems that life is easier for some people and harder for others through no fault or choice of their own. Granted, there are choices we can make to make life harder or easier for ourselves going forward, but we can't choose the difficulty we start with, and life sometimes changes the difficulty on us for reasons completely outside our control.

Perhaps, instead of bemoaning the lack of choice we have over the difficulty of life, we should acknowledge that everyone has their own set of difficulties and that those difficulties are meant to help us grow. When life gets hard, God doesn't want us to sulk or wish that life was easier; He wants us to become wiser, stronger, and better people.

So, while I plan to continue to enjoy the optional ease and difficulty of games, I'll try to remember that, while life can be game-like in some ways, that doesn't mean that we're the ones who get to adjust the settings. Some games don't have difficulty settings anyway. Rather, I should try to accept life and get good at playing it as it is, no matter what the difficulty settings are set to.