diamonds

You’re going to lose your house; you can’t afford it anymore. How are you going to tell your kids? A friend calls with urgency in his voice, asking you to meet up with him. He looks a bit worried when you get there. He tells you about an immediate job that’ll sort out all your financial problems. After just two short weeks, everything can be sorted. The problem is, half of the people who accept this job, will be dead in two weeks. You don’t like gambling with your life, but how do you tell your kids they don’t have a home anymore. Then again, how does someone tell them they don’t have you anymore?

The job requires robots to go deep into an unsafe mine. The problem is a robot costs 2 million Dollars, and they lose a lot of them due to the unstable conditions. It’s highly illegal to send people down there, but it’s much cheaper. That’s where you come in. The company has a two week gap where no one will inspect their operations. In those two weeks they send as many desperate people down there as they can find. This time around you’ll be one of them… You take the job.

The two weeks that follow breaks you in ways you didn’t know you could break. Besides the close calls you suffer, you witness as the lives of three people are ripped from this world. The last three days are the worst. You are responsible for bringing up the bodies of the fallen. You have to clean up the evidence that humans were ever down there. Your soul has never been torn to shreds like this. Dying seems like a beautiful release right now. Your heart doesn’t want to beat anymore. It’s pleading with you to take your last breath. You can’t imagine suffering more than this! But it’s worth it. That’s what you tell yourself. You have to believe that this is worth it.

You walk out of the mine for the last time. You want to smile, but you’re completely empty. You collapse in the locker room with the seven others that survived. Your supervisor hands each one of you a bag with your spoils. It’s not worth it! You didn’t really allow hell into your heart for a little bag of money, did you? It’s over now, but it was never worth it! One of the guys you worked with sits down next to you. He hands you his bag. “You need this more than I do”. Your eyes shoot open, WTF! “How can you suffer hell and then give me your money?”He shrugs, “I run a very successful company, I don’t need the money.”

You stare at him, you can’t find the words. The shock of his words seems to nudge your heart back to life. “WTF is wrong with you? Why are you here?” He stands up with pride and power (where the hell did he find that???) “I have all the physical stuff I want, but one morning I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. Pressure creates diamonds. Each time I walk away from something like this, I’m stronger, more beautiful, becoming more like a stunning diamond. Each time I suffer this, I love myself more.”

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You can’t go through this life without suffering now and then. The questions is, do your troubles break you, or strengthen you? You might not realize this, but that decision is yours to make.