Holy cow and such. It's been way too long. I have all kinds of excuses as to why I haven't posted in over a month, but all of them are just that. Excuses.
I tried to make another excuse today. I'm sick. Nasty little cold. But no! Not today. Today I will push through it and prevail! Onward and victory and other cheesy words and phrases.
The word for today is "hardship." Actually, that might technically be two words. But the word could just as easily be "trials", "personal atrocity"(again, two words), or anything else that more or less means the same thing.
Why do bring this up? Well, mostly because it came up alot over the last month or so in the conversations I've had with other people. It got me thinking, and as we all know, that rarely ends well.
But it does, however, provide me with nifty blog material. Soo...
Woohoo.
Now, we have all experienced some sort of hardship or bad moment or what have you at some point in our lives. Some worse than others, or course. This theme comes up alot in my line of work. However, what got me thinking about it was a youth Sabbath school I sat in on about a month ago. I trade off teaching it with a lady who is there every week. I have to rotate my time since I have three churches all grasping for my attention.
Oh the joys of "popularity".
Gag.
However, since I happened to be late that day, she went ahead and taught and I sat and pretended to be one of the little monkies instead of the head monkey.
And she did a fine job.
Huh, that was anti-climactic, wasn't it?
Oh yes, my point. I forgot.
The lesson was on hardship and it's purpose. And she did a great job of going through the lesson and regurgitating all it's pre-written points and reciting all the christian cliche on how troubles and trials are just tests that refine our faith.
I am sure any of you who have ever even heard of a bible have heard all that stuff before. And there is scriptural reason for those responses. However, they never really get expanded on, and rarely ever get made practical and relevant and real to us in any way. They just remain some abstract idea that some how we are suppose to just be happy with.
I don't think that was ever the intention. We humans like to create our own problems.
But I digress.
So the lady recited all the lesson goodies and gave all the cliche(albeit vaguely accurate) responses. But then she stopped and looked at me. And she said, "I know this, I've heard all before. But honestly, I just don't get it. I don't understand how this is suppose to work. Hardship just makes me sad and angry and bitter. I just don't know if I understand this. I have a hard time with this idea."
I'm paraphrasing, of course. It's been over a month, and my brain doesn't remember that far back very well.
But her question was honest. Her feeling was genuine. And her need was real and palpable.
All of us either have, or will, experience something in our lives that will alter the way we see everything. And if it doesn't, it probably should. But taking that experience and trying to trivialize it with general comments like, "it's for your own good" or "it will make you a better person" just frustrates us instead of helping us. Those ideas may have some truth to them. But very few things in life are ever that straightforward or clear cut.
I would like to suggest two things in regard to this concept. And I think the realities there in are more or less accurate regardless of one believes in the guidance of God or not.
The first one is very simple. Not everything that happens to us actually has anything to do with us.
This gives christians more problems than any other group. Especially North American christians. We are very egocentric. Everything is about us or me. And when you combine that with the idea that God is love and that He is always working for my good, we can easily forget that God also works for other peoples good as well.
For example. You are driving down the road and as you cross an intersection, some drunk guy runs a redlight and completely annihilates you from the side. Later as you are laying in a hospital bed, broken and bleeding, you are wondering why this happened to you. What did I do to deserve this? Why did God make/allow this to happen? Why didn't He protect me?
All of those are very natural questions, but they all assume a premise that is quite possibly false. The false assumptions is that the accident had anything to do with you at all.
Maybe it did. But it didn't have to. There are 6.9ish billion people wandering around this planet and to think that everything that happens has anything to do with me is a bit selfish and egocentric. How many people were involved with that accident? You, the other driver, a plethera of witnesses and maybe collateral damage victims. A handful of police and paramedics. Nurses and doctors at the hospital. Not to mention your family and friends and the other drivers family and friends.
How many is that?
Alot.
But of all those people, the accident was meant to be a lesson for you? Just because you were at the center?
Maybe.
But concider this, and I will use a very poor analogy to demonstrate. If you are in the center of a mob of people and you have a gun, and you start pulling the trigger, who is going to impacted the most? You, the one at the center holding the gun? Or the people around you who are eating the bullets?
What that very bad analogy shows is that just because you are in the middle of the situations doesn't mean that it's about you or that it only affects you. Or that it even effects you the most.
One thing I've found in dealing with dying people and the funerals that follow is that it's almost always harder for the people live than the one who is dying. Sure, it's happening to the dying person, but it is much harder on the non-dying people. In many ways, they much more to deal with. The dying person has one thing. He/she is will soon be dead. Those who have to live on have that and much more.
Who says the benefit or silver lining of an experience has anything to do with the one in the middle of any given issue?
Which leads to the second point I'd like to make here.
Much has been said about how hard times can some how make us better people. Alot of it I think is stuff we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. Some of it is true. Some of it is not.
Within the christian community, we always look for some higher meaning in everything. I'm not saying that is bad. I will say that we should refer to point one I made earlier.
But also, I would like to suggest a concrete and relevant truth about the nature of hardship vs status quo.
To be clear. No one wants hardship. Not me, not anyone. I would almost never choose it over easy living. And I don't think anyone wants us to.
But when hardship does come, and it will, here is a reality to consider.
Every day we go through our lives. We have a nice little routine. We get up. Use the bathroom. Brush our teeth. Eat breakfast. Shower. Go to work. Come home. Eat dinner. Go to bed.
Or some other variation on that. You get the idea. We have this routine that we go through every day. And most of the time it's pretty static. It doesn't really change much. Sure there is vacation, or a sick day, or the weekend, but most of the time our lives are pretty ordered.
And that's ok. However, on an intellectual level, it restrains us. We know what is coming. We know what to expect. Our world is pretty contained and smallish, and there is no need to reason beyond it. Why come up with a different way of doing things if the way we are doing it works just fine? We get fed, we get paid, we are more or less content. Why fix what isn't broken, right?
The only problem there, is that while we move along just fine, we don't really get a chance to grow much. Not intellectually, not emotionally, not experientually.
Until something comes along to shake things up, that is. Something like a good old fashion hardship. Something breaks down our routine. Reveals the flaw in our perception of everything. Shows us that the way we do things does not actually work all the time. And when this happens, we are suddenly forced to look for a way to get through the problem and triumph.
The hardship forces us to think differently than we normally do. Our routine doesn't hold all the answers anymore. Or at least, the hardship revealed issues that we never bothered to consider.
And then, once we have finally broken through that trial and found our way out of the shambles, we have new perspective on things. Our life was changed. The parameters of our life have been altered and the borders of the box that we normally think in have been shattered, or at least been pushed outward.
What hardship does for us is that it forces us to think differently and to consider possibilities and directions that we would never have normally considered.
Let me give you are real life example. One not so catastrophic.
I used to be an artist/designer. I would sit and paint or design on whatever project I was working on. I would always go into it with a plan of attack. I knew more or less what I was wanting to accomplish, and I had an idea of how I was going to get there. I have my own techniques for doing my art and my own concept of how design should work and what it should look like. Every artist does. That is how we know what a mistake is.
Then you make a mistake. A wrong brush stroke. A wrong font size. A wrong color. And suddenly you are scrambling to figure out how to fix this mistake, especially if it's something that isn't easily fixed. So I would look and look and stare and think. Then I would stop, get up and step back. Just walk away. Then I would come back and look at it again. It would be at that point I would notice something.
I would notice that my mistake didn't look half bad. Not only that, as I would look at it, I would realize that the mistake looked better than what I had intended. And not only that, I would start to see ways to not only incorporate the mistake but I would see new directions in which to take the piece that would never have even considered if I had not made the mistake.
The mistake took me in a direction that my normal ideas about art and design would not have taken me.
You know how often that happened to me? Almost every time I made a mistake. So, alot.
We are creatures of habit. We almost never try to think of things in new ways unless we are forced to. And, unfortunately, hardship is one way of forcing us to think in new ways. It's not the only way, or course. But it's a pretty effective one.
And whether we think that the things that happen to us are random, or whether they are guided, makes no difference. Either way, we are still faced with an opportunity to see things differently and alter the way we look at everything.
Carpe Diem. Sieze the day. Like most phrases it has become cliche. But like most cliches, they become that way because there is an element of wisdom to them.
We are presented with opportunities for growth and expansion every day. We just need to be able to recognize them and grab hold and then let those opportunities take us to a place we hadn't considered before.
Live long and prosper.
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