Living Under Orion

“If I’m ever lost, I just need to find Orion’s Belt and I’ll find my way home. My house is right underneath the constellation,” I said proudly.

“You do know that the earth spins, right?” my friend had said in response.

“Oh.” I had forgotten.

As a kid, I frequently asked to borrow my dad’s phone to use an app to look at the night sky. When I asked why the sky wasn’t sprinkled with light like his phone claimed, my dad pointed out several reasons; distance and light pollution were two. After months of using the app, I grew to recognize Orion’s Belt and I became extremely proud of myself for being able to find it. On clear nights, before I entered my house, I always stayed a few extra seconds to find Orion before I went inside. I grew to associate the constellation with home until it became my North Star, my guide home if I ever got lost.

One of the survival tips I learned from the adventure books I grew up reading was to find the North Star to gain my bearings and realign my sense of direction. Unfortunately, I have no idea where the real North Star is in the sky, but Orion is all I’ve ever needed and I am happy with that. Eventually, I got curious, and after a quick Google search, I learned that Polaris (the North Star) is the prime reference for night travel because it stays relatively in the same place in our sky instead of circling the world like Orion does. A sense of direction requires consistency and a stationary reference point so that even cloudy nights are not too much of an obstacle.

Fall 2022 was a cloudy night, to put it lightly. Not only were the days physically shorter, but I struggled to find good things in the midst of my trials. When others tried to encourage me, I took it as misinterpretations of what I was going through. When my family tried to pull me out of the downward spiral, my pride justified my feelings. I didn’t want to admit to anyone, not even to myself, that I needed help.

Whenever I came home from college and clouds blotted out the stars, I kept my eyes on the driveway so I wouldn’t step on anything gross instead of my usual habit of identifying Orion. Similarly, I kept my eyes on every one of my problems instead of admiring the blessings; my first reaction was complaint.

A ‘B’ on my exam? Ugh, I would’ve done better if I didn’t have friendship issues going on.

Fellowship feels more distant than last year. I would be enjoying the gatherings a lot more if I were sleeping at night instead of having to worry about family struggles, relationships, and grades.

As a naturally optimistic person, I usually just brushed troubles off, picked myself up, and tried to focus on the positive, but after a while, I grew tired of it.

Why do I need to be so happy all the time? Why do my parents tell me to be grateful even though there’s nothing worth being grateful for?

Optimism, in most cases, is my preferred mindset because it leads me to find the positives in a world of negatives. By viewing the glass half-full, I see opportunities in places many others might not, and when things are hard, it provides me with mental strength to keep going. I thought staying optimistic was staying grateful because optimism sort of “ig nores” the negatives. Being grateful is commanded in the Bible and because I equated optimism and gratitude, I thought I needed to be constantly happy in front of God to do the right thing.

It soon became clear that holding on to optimism is not gratitude. My resolve to stay optimistic shifts with my circumstances. When things go well, it’s easy to look on the bright side, but if the expected results do not match my efforts, my mood plummets.

Ignoring negatives brings about pain, which was what I didn’t realize would happen if I maintained a facade of “happiness” for too long. As weeks passed, putting on an aura of “happiness” everyday proved to be impossible, wreaking havoc on my health. I misunderstood what I read in the Bible — something in my life needed to be realigned.

I never used to let things get to me like this, what happened?

Why was trying to see the glass half-full and ignoring the emptiness above so detrimental? Grateful optimism is something much deeper; it’s appreciating the full ness in the bottom half while acknowledging the emptiness in the top half of the glass.

Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” My mom had recited this verse to me on multiple occasions, and I realized it applied to me in my discontentment. Acknowledging that life is hard but still choosing to labor to find diamonds of joy amidst trial uncovers another layer of optimism. Being truly grateful for something, even in the midst of hardship, protects our hearts from complaint’s poison.

Proverbs 4:23 is a hard command to follow. Keepers have a difficult job because guarding requires alertness, caution, and knowledge of both the enemy and the treasure you’re protecting, but we still do our job because losing the treasure is a cost too great to pay; treasured treasure is worth the hard work that goes into its security.

In my case, I knew neither my enemy nor the treasure I had to protect. Complaint is a sly enemy that has the necessary intel to slide past defenses, avoid attention, and twist understanding — and hardship is its favorite opportunity to strike. I thought I had to protect my perspective of my situation, when in reality, perspective is my defense and my heart is the treasure.

Eventually, I took a deep breath and looked at the sky again. I found myself lost in a forest trying to get home by following Orion, and it was getting me nowhere. What I had understood as the path through my hardship was misguided, and I had been running in circles in Fall 2022’s wilderness. But instead of staring at the driveway and grumbling about the dirt, I remind myself to look to the sky. God is my ultimate guide, and rooting my perspective in Him transforms my optimism; He is my Polaris. Just as navigation is a survival skill that takes practice to master, realigning my compass and sense of direction will take time and effort, but my first step is realizing who my guide is. Other shiny promises obscure the sky and make it hard to find my North, but I know that God will lead me home.

Hannah is a second-year CS and Linguistics major who only recognizes the bottom half of the Orion constellation. She doesn’t know where the rest is.