Thursday, July 31, 2008
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When Life Gets Hard
Some days, I think that my life is hard. I tell myself that I don't know how I could survive if it got any worse. Do you ever have days like that?
And then I think of a mom and her three little children who we built a house for in Mexico a few years ago. They had just spent the last three rainy weeks in some pallets and cardboard and a little bit of plastic in the Tijuana dump. We spent $300.00 on plywood and two-by-fours and some rolled roofing and built them an 8 X 12 house with a door and a window and a dirt floor. To them it was a mansion! Or maybe I remember the people I met in Haiti in a small village a couple of miles deep in a sugar cane plantation who were overjoyed when a giant sea turtle washed up on the beach. Their average income was only about $200.00, not per week, not even per month, that was for the whole year! What about the people whom I have read about that live in places where it is unpopular or even illegal to be Christian and are persecuted for their faith? Maybe I don't have it so bad after all.
I wonder, however, whether at some level, no matter where we find ourselves or what our situation, we don't all have trouble of one kind or another that simply grows out of and is dependent on our specific set of circumstances. I am pretty sure that there are things that trouble me that would hardly be a concern for that little family in Mexico. They on the other hand, have problems that aren't mine at all. And I'm sure that millionaires face troubles that I have even given a second thought. Maybe part of the human condition is that we will all have trouble wherever we find ourselves. And while the details may be different, we all have days that we wish would end. Should this surprise us? Jesus said to all of his disciples, "In this world you will have trouble" (John 16:33).
No matter who you are or where you find yourself, you will have trouble. We will all have bad days. There will always be those times when life seems hard and too big to handle. Jesus said that we would have trouble, but, he when on to say, "Take heart! I have overcome the world." "This is the victory that overcomes the world," we read in 1 John 5:4, "even our faith."
Did you know that your faith is able to give you life overcoming victory? It can because it takes a different perspective from what the world would give you on the way that things are. Faith overcomes by measuring whatever my today might hold with an eternal measuring stick.
"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us and eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
Whatever may be difficult for us right now will not be forever. It is a light and momentary trouble. Don't be too surprised by it. Know that it will pass. It could be gone by tomorrow. Embrace those troubles and know that everything that we go through is achieving for us an eternal glory. God wants us to come out of each test, each trouble, victorious by faith. And as the perspective of faith — the eternal, unseen dimension — becomes real in us, we will overcome. Scripture promises that it will be so!
When life gets hard, we choose to faith it, and the payoff is eternal glory! Hallelujah!
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