Suffering.
I think my nephew said it best when he put it in his
child-like words,
“For some reason I always remember the bad stuff, so much
better than the good stuff.”
We were talking about memories and when he made this
statement it brought it all together for me. We were specifically talking about when our entire family went to Disneyland several years ago, and he got lost (for about 7 minutes).
So we all spent a zillion dollars to have a
great vacation and spoil the crap out of our children and all they remember is the
7 minutes when Corvan got lost.
We always hear the
age old question….Why does God let bad things happen to good people?
There are many things jacked up with that question, but
my nephew put it into such a simple statement that made a lot of sense to me.
I began to think of the greatest joys in my life, like
getting married, I remember many amazing things about that day, but
one of my most vivid memories I have of that day was cussing at my sister, who
was doing my hair, (just as the church secretary was walking in to say
something sweet, I’m sure) and I was going a little bridezilla on my sis.
(Ya, Sorry about that
AGAIN Marlece).
I remember the birth of each of my babies, but I hardly
remember the details of each one, OTHER than I can give you a play by play of
TRANSITION (the hardest part of labor) in each birth, what I felt and smelled
and saw and heard..…I even have TRANSITION memories of the adopted children. J
So I cringe when I hear Christians talk about our best life
now, I want to puke my brains out. I’m sorry
to be so harsh…but if THIS is our best life NOW, then we are getting
screwed. Jesus came and died so we could
have our best life with HIM later…He suffered on this earth, in this life, so
WE, could have an eternal perfect life with HIM forever.
NO SUFFERING or PAIN
or LOSS, that is the life I have hope in and LIVE for!
It’s not now, It’s
later, when Jesus comes back to set it allllllllll right!
It’s a no wonder we see so many "Christians" either faking it,
or completely bummed about life. They
have been fed the lie that we are supposed to live our best life NOW and we are
supposed to pursue happiness and success, all in the name of Jesus,
who
suffered and died so we can live our best life NOW??
No way!
We get to live with
the HOPE and JOY of knowing we are living now in anticipation of LATER.
Most of the time it’s really not our fault, we live in a
beautiful amazing country and we live dang good lives compared to the rest of
the world. We can live in a way that we
can protect ourselves from a lot of suffering. We live in a country that has
done a lot of things right and we have the freedom and opportunity to live
without a lot of the massive amounts of suffering that a lot of the rest of the
world lives with.
We have food and we have medicine and we have freedom to
worship and we have the awesome and amazing men and women in uniform to serve
and protect us and our country and our freedom.
We should be so thankful and humbled that in God’s sovereignty and
grace, He has allowed us to live in such a place.
I can promise you that it was NOTHING you or
I did right to make this happen for us.
This is called the GRACE OF GOD!!!
Somehow when and where we are born we don’t get to call the shots on
that one.
It makes me think about James 1:27.
27 Religion that is pure and
undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to
visit orphans and widows in their
affliction, and to keep one self unstained from the world.
I have been learning
the deeper meaning of this verse. I
think this verse is about suffering. You
can’t throw money or a family or a husband or a 3 step plan, or even a Bible
verse at an orphan or a widow in their affliction and make them feel better or
heal their heartbreak. I think there is
a time and a place to provide allllll those things (maybe not the husband one,)
but “in their distress, it says to visit them”.
Maybe if we visited those that are suffering, and entered
into that suffering and hurt with them, rather than trying to fix them, or
their situation, we would understand the need, the desperate need for our
Savior Jesus Christ our Lord, who came and took on unbelievable suffering for
us that by HIS wounds we would be healed and by His death we may have life.
1 Peter 2:24English
Standard Version (ESV)
24 He himself bore our sins in
his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to
righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
Why would God send His Son to suffer and die if it is possible
to live our best life now with a few good thoughts and declarations and
attitudes? Why wouldn’t he send Jesus to
show us how to do it that way?
I’m not
saying we need to suffer and die….I’m saying in this life we WILL suffer and we WILL die.
Suffering is EVERYWHERE,
we just have to open our eyes. If it’s
not in our own lives at the moment, I can promise you it’s not hard to find and
I would dare to say, rather than protecting ourselves from it, we should go and visit and enter in,
because we will find out how much this world really needs
Jesus!
This idea of waking up and having your perfect life in your
perfect order does not work in the life of an orphan or a widow in their
distress.
I think we should
wake up every day and rather than declare who I am and what I can do….we should declare who the great
I AM
is and what HE has done.
We need to wake up, and rather than say how I
am going to do better and have victory over this and that, I am going to
declare how much I need JESUS and how I need more of him every single day, and
how weak I am, but how strong the
GREAT I AM
is in me.
I’m going to pray and think less about me and who I am, and
more about,
HOW GREAT THOU ART!
