Have You Ever Said, “I Feel Stuck?”

Here’s how to get unstuck.

Getting stuck is truly unpleasant. I’ve been there many times. How about you?

You try to move forward in life two steps, only to wind up going backward three steps. It’s frustrating and can begin to seem hopeless.

Sometimes the very solutions that you come up with to solve the problem, only serve to get you more stuck. They create more problems.

When I was in my early twenties I drove around in a small pickup truck. It was a cool truck. It had slightly over size wheels and I could go a lot of places that a four wheel drive vehicle could go, even though it was only two wheel drive.

One time in late March I decided to go exploring off the main road. It had been a cold winter and the snow was beginning to partially melt. It was in the late afternoon.

I drove for a long way down a canal bank on the ice and snow just fine. Gradually I began to sink into the mud on my way back to the main road.

My little truck sank to the bottom of the truck. I tried every trick I could think of to get out. I put it in reverse and forward and tried rocking it. I tried putting snow chains on it. It just dug deeper.

It was getting late and very cold. I calmed myself down and put my mind in problem solving mode. Pretty soon an idea came to me.

I sludged my way back to the main road and hitched a ride back to my dormitory. I found someone who would give me a ride back to the truck at 4 AM.

At 4:30 AM I got into the truck, started it up and drove right out of the grooves and back to the dormitory! The ground had frozen enough that their was no problem.

It took me calming down and getting into problem solving mode.

Just using more power in the truck failed to solve the problem. In fact, it made the problem worse. I had to step away from the problem and look at it from a completely different angle.

Your mind is designed to be amazingly creative. God is the creator. According to the Bible, you and I are created in God’s Image. That means we’ve been given the ability to be creative, too.

Just like getting out of a Chinese finger puzzle requires you to think counter intuitively, getting unstuck may require you to be counter intuitive.

The more calm you are, the more creative you can be.

My father grew up in the South. He told me several times about one of the big differences between a horse and a mule. He said that if a horse got it’s hoof caught in a barbed wire fence, it would often panic and begin yanking until it damaged it’s hoof beyond repair.

On the other hand, a mule would simply wait until someone came along and helped it out of the predicament.

• Be calm.
• Step back from the stuck place.
• Ask yourself how important it is for you to be unstuck and if it’s OK.
• If it is, simply ask yourself, “What’s the best way for me to be FREE?”
  
• Wait for the answer.