BUCKING THE SYSTEM: BAD LUCK IS ALL IN HOW YOU LOOK AT IT

I've always considered myself a lucky person. Not because I win athletic contests or lotteries with regularity, and not because I make chance meetings with people who can help me professionally or financially. Those kinds of happenings are reserved for truly lucky people and are once-in-a-lifetime events.

My luck is a lot more regular. It often involves receiving financial windfalls or finding lost articles at exactly the right time. I also have a knack for juuuuust missing disaster in any number of circumstances.

But a series of events over the past month had caused me to wonder whether my luck had finally run out.

First, there was the slip on the ice that occurred in mid-December. Whereas most people would have suffered only a little embarrassment and maybe a wet backside, I wound up with a fractured elbow in my left arm that have rendered me unable to work, sleep or even put on my own hosiery for the past three weeks.

And then there was Christmas Eve at my parents' house. It only took my presence for the water pump on the well to go out, which meant hauling water in five-gallon buckets from a neighbor's house until the plumber arrived three days later.

Of course, since I was in a cast I didn't have to haul water, which didn't endear me to the rest of the family.

I'll gloss over several mini-traumas to get to the next big one, which occurred just this week. On the coldest day of the week, my new furnace stopped working. Patrick, of course, was at work, which left me and the kids to brave the cold, dark night. Thanks to layers, comforters and a good electric heater, we made it, only to find out the next morning a confused bird had fallen down the flue and got caught in the motor.

I had to pay someone to get him out.

Now, a more negative person would have gone into a deep depression over all the drama I've dealt with recently or simply gotten a bad attitude. As long as I dwelled on the "luck" of it all, I did become a very tall version of Schleprock, walking around with my own personal raincloud and grousing a version of "Wowsy, wowsy, woo, woo" to anyone who would listen.

But then I looked inside myself, and that's what I remembered something my grandmother Ma Dear once told me. She didn't believe in luck, because she said it was something we make for ourselves.

Instead, Ma Dear, who is a good Christian woman, believed we all are put through tests of faith, patience and fortitude. Sometimes we pass, sometimes we fail, but if we're lucky, we learn something about ourselves when it's over.

When I looked at my problems through Ma Dear's eyes, I saw many things to be thankful for. My fracture could have been a break of my dominant arm. If Mr. Mullins' water also had gone out, we would have had to consider much more expensive options. And we could have had a more complex and expensive problem in our furnace than just a dead bird.

Ma Dear is a wise woman, and more than once her teachings have stood the test of time. We are living in times that will try men's souls, but if we look within, we can almost always find the strength to endure.