Your worst case scenario

I attended a funeral recently of an older acquaintance from Church. It is inevitable that we will all die one day and by all measures this individual had lived a wonderful life. He was survived by loving friends, family, children and grandchildren who spoke about him fondly. There was an air of love and admiration for him. It was beautiful to witness at such a sad occasion.

This man had lived most of his life with one kidney, a heart condition and was a chain smoker. His daughter described him as a “ticking health time bomb” and it seemed as if the family had been mentally and emotionally preparing for this for a long time.

This made me think about how hard it is to prepare for difficult life events. The thoughts of the scenarios are not pleasant at all and not really what one would like to occupy their thoughts with. So inevitably people avoid such topics and when the eventualities occur are completely unprepared. We see evidence of this in death when people die without leaving a will or in employment when people are unexpectedly laid off.

I listened to a talk from a South African CEO recently. He was telling the audience to run scenarios of how they would survive financially if the interest rates went up to 25%. He had looked at his own business and they were confident that in that scenario the business would survive. At the time of writing interest rates in South Africa are around 10% and have been within this range for over 10 years. Yet, this individual thought it prudent to consider his worst case scenario.

So what then makes it onto your list of worst case scenarios and have you thought about the impact on yourself or loved ones? Very sad and unpleasant thoughts to have, but worth having if we are to mitigate the situation.

A few years ago my son suffered a stroke at age 6. This left him paralysed and hemiplegic with no movement on his left side. By God’s Grace he has made a full recovery now and regained mobility. We were never prepared for such a bad thing to happen to a small child and I can guarantee you this would never have made it as a topic of conversation at our dinner table. But it happened. Besides death of a loved one, there are few scenarios I can think of that are more painful than seeing the pain of a child. Especially, when it’s your child.

Are there any other worst case scenarios in your life that you need to think through? Which events have the potential to greatly disrupt your life? Do you have a plan or a point of view of how you will deal with them? We are encouraged in today’s world to be positive and look at the bright side of life. A view I fully endorse. However, don’t forget about that reality that life isn’t perfect and ignoring thinking about bad things won’t stop them from happening.