FINDING YOUR INNER STRENGTH – Every day you’re alive is a gift, although many days it doesn’t feel that way. You may be overwhelmed by death, disease, destruction, or financial ruin—sometimes all of them simultaneously. When life feels like hell instead of a gift, how do you cope?
Winston Churchill said, “when you’re going through hell, keep going.” But that requires tremendous inner strength. How do you learn to develop that? It is said, when the student is ready, the teacher appears—and teachers appear in many forms. When I was a teenager, I met Anita, a frail elderly English woman. From outward appearances she seemed an unlikely inner strength instructor. Then she revealed she’d lived through the Air Blitz on London during the Battle of Britain in World War II. As a history buff, I excitedly asked, “What was it like?”
“June 1940 was dreadful Mark. France surrendered to Germany. The British army was evacuated from France by our Navy. Our soldiers had to abandon their tanks and artillery. If the German Army landed in England, we were defenseless. On the radio we heard a defeated French General say, ‘Britain will have her neck wrung like a chicken in two weeks.’”
“That must’ve been scary.”
“Scary is an understatement. Then the German bombers came. Our Royal Air Force pilots fought valiantly—but every day for four months the German Luftwaffe bombed London. The Germans put loudspeakers on dive bomber’s wings so when they dove to drop bombs it made a horrid screeching sound. I can still hear the sound of those dive bombers in my mind.”
“I’ve read about that,” I replied, “Those were designed to scare people.”
“They did more than that Mark–they killed people.”
“I’m sorry–uh…” my teenage self was speechless.
“We never knew what was coming next. One day I went to work and it wasn’t there. Another day I went home after work and it wasn’t there. My mother was in tears as our house smoldered into ashes. Thank goodness Mum had been detained at work and got home late. It was a direct hit she would’ve been killed. My Dad was in the Royal Navy–somewhere at sea. We never knew from one day to the next if he were alive.”
Anita definitely had my attention.
“The bombings were dreadful. We’d scurry for shelter in the tubes–the subway as you Americans call them–or if we were at home or work in the nearest basement. The explosions rattled and shook everything. We huddled together with perfect strangers–not very English being tactile with a stranger mind you, but those were desperate times and we were all in it together. The explosions rocked the ground, we’d pray the ceilings wouldn’t collapse on us and we’d be buried alive. It was even worse when the lights went out. We’d wait for hours in total darkness–never knowing if it truly had stopped and if was safe to go out again.”
I hung onto every one of her words.
“Mark, I never had friends like I did then,” she paused thoughtfully. “I can still see their faces. We were comrades in arms, bonded together. I lost so many friends. Although it was years ago, the pain feels like yesterday. I often think of happier times before the war. We’d meet at a pub for a pint. It seemed so routine at the time. I guess we didn’t realize how good we had it before the war–how happy we were.”
She looked down and paused to regain her composure.
“Lofty,” she whispered. “Lofty? I don’t understand.”
“Lofty was a young man I was rather fond of–he was thin and very tall–that’s why he was called Lofty. Hell of nice guy—he lived in a flat near me. His building was bombed. They never found his body.” A tear rolled down her cheek.
“Anita, I’m so sorry. How did you go on?”
“Stiff upper lip!” she replied. Her eyes lit up. “Being brave isn’t about being fearless Mark—I was scared all the time, we all were, terrified in fact.
I don’t know if I could’ve handled that.
“Rubbish! Yes you could! A crisis is no time to fall apart, even if you want to. You cannot control many things in life, but you can control how you respond to them. We jolly well weren’t giving up–not to Hitler and his Nazis!” This frail old woman suddenly seemed invincible.
“I discovered I was stronger than I ever knew. I had no other choice than to put one foot before the other and trudge on no matter what. I had to rise to the occasion, make sacrifices, do whatever was necessary. Something inside of me emerged and I realized to survive I had to adapt. And—with Mr. Churchill on the wireless encouraging us that no matter how impossible it seemed we were going to survive and win—and we did.”
Anita taught me that each of us is stronger than we think. Those terrified Londoners huddled together in dark basements and subway tubes during relentless bombings were just ordinary people like you and me who were going through hell—yet they found the strength to endure. At some point in life, each of us will go through hell, but that is also when you may find your inner strength which will light the way to keep going even through the darkest hell.
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