How do you respond to adversity? How do you handle hardship? If you were to lose everything and face poverty, what would you do? We might think the response to affliction and poverty would be misery and despair. But that doesn’t have to be the case. In 2 Corinthians 8, the Apostle Paul holds up Christians from Macedonia as a wonderful example. He says, “…in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.”
How did they respond to severe affliction? With abundant joy. How? They focused on helping others, not wallowing in their misery. How did they handle poverty? They were overwhelmingly generous. They didn’t cling to what precious little they had—they gave to others who were also in need. They remind us that our situations don’t define us. We can choose how to respond to life situations, even the hard ones, with joy and generosity.