You’re all right. Most of our lives suck for… well most of our lives. Sure, I believe in a saving grace. I believe in the promise of God. But looking back and to what lies ahead sometimes, if I’m honest, my heart is heavy. You have to be strong to wake up each day and plaster a smile to your face while you grandmother is slowly passing in an ICU room somewhere, or while your children don’t seem to have the desires for life or respect for themselves that you want for them. You have to be strong to nod pleasantly at strangers while you battle breast cancer or think of someone that you hurt in the past. I’m not raining on your parade, I’m being honest with you.
I live in a beautiful world with beautiful people who care for me and each other so openly. We are friendly, even in disagreement. We pray for each other, especially the ones we have the most issue with. We are concerned with the family members of others we have never even met. We are generally more honest with others than we are with ourselves. The people in my life treat each other fairly. But all of us, in our own little ways, suffer for or from the memory of someone else. Whether it be someone we lost, someone we left, someone who left us, or even someone we just didn’t do enough for. We have all been wronged by and done wrong to someone else. We leave and receive scars on peoples hearts and our own and scars don’t go away.
Our Bible is full of trial and error. We have record of many of God’s chosen who have failed and been failed. The Bible is a who’s who in suffering. The successes of the Bible are not celebratory stories of men who lived righteous lives and lived blessed all of their days without pain. The men and women we respect, who really pull at our souls and minds, from scripture and history are people with drama and suffering, people who lost battles and to many what would seem wars. Our closest to heart are the ones that “went down swinging”. We call the stories of the characters who run off with the damsel in the end to live happily ever after “fairy tales”. We do this because we know the truth of the world, that it is broken… just as every heart beating or that has ever beat has been broken, at least once.
Whether it be by your mistakes, or at the hands of another, or just by some random encounter with coincidence or disease, we are all broken. And strength, wisdom, desire, will, love and faith is what it takes to make sure that the nod you offer that stranger seems believable at times. This is the theme of the book that God has left for us. He left us stories of abuse and illness and loss among other disasters and made those men or women that survived them, faithfully, our heroes. See, we wake up as followers of Christ and put on a pretty face for others because we don’t want them to think that we don’t know how lucky we are to have Jesus. It’s a genuine feeling after all, we are so happy to have him as a savior. But, I think that the pretty face is sometimes meant to conceal the things that make Jesus so necessary to begin with.
The world is broken and so are you, and so am I. Along with our family members and those living on the other side of the world, we are broken. Somewhere someone or something hurt your feelings. God, presented us with rules of life or maybe, just as our Father, with simple requests of how He desired we treat our brothers and sisters because He knew how messed up it would all seem once the first man was mistreated. See, the heroes of the bible were never victorious in life because that’s not the point. The heroes were the one’s who, when a troubled life came to an end, had mustered up enough strength to still love the ones that they were leaving behind, enough wisdom to love those that caused their troubles, even when that person was themselves, and enough faith that God would make it all ok in the end.
God tells us many times not to search for success in life because He knows how misrepresenting worldly success really is. It’s a half hearted victory, because the scars will still remain. Success in God’s vision is surviving the trials with enough love left in you to still love in the end, then you’re a hero. Your trials, just like Paul’s and John’s and Jesus’ are valuable. That is why God shared those stories with you instead of the water cooler conversations from scripture times. God isn’t looking for you to mock your trials, He wants you to be honest about them with yourself as well as others, and faithful through them.
So continue to nod at the stranger you pass and be as joyous through life as you possibly can, but remember that what you are experiencing is real and that life really is tough at times. As long as you understand that God knows this is hard for you you’ll probably keep trying to smile.
