A couple of years back a gentleman that I was working with gave me a CD with one of his pastors sermon’s on it. I’m afraid I can’t remember the pastors name or the church in Baltimore that this person attended but I do recall the gist of the sermon and that it was about the school of hard knocks. The pastors sermon was about his walk with the Lord and the progression of learning that God had put him through. This learning that he referred to as The School of Hard Knocks. Now we’ve all been to this school a time or two and it’s never a fun place to visit. Most times you wonder if you’ll ever get out of it alive. But, when you do, you breathe a sigh of relief and see that the things that you thought were difficult before are now a cake walk in comparison to what you just went through. The humorous point this pastor was making was how he had gone through Kindergarten, Elementary, Junior and Senior High School and thought (and hoped and prayed) that he was done. But God wasn’t through teaching him, so along came College. At this the Pastor thought to himself (phew!) I made it now for sure, I’ve graduated and I’m done. But then Graduate school came along. And after that there was a Doctorate program to attend with a long dissertation to write. He’s still wondering if God has in mind another Doctorate program.
But that’s not what the world wants to hear nor is it what the world teaches. The world teaches that given enough time and knowledge we can figure out how everything works and just the right tact for us to take in order to achieve all our desires. In the end, without ever admitting it to ourselves, what we would really like is to have Stepford lives – just please throw in a little managed excitement once in a while. And we want it all now, not later. Put it on credit, I’ll pay it back on your wonderfully deferred, installment plan.
Sounds great and some of us are creative enough to actually get a way with that as our reality for quite some time. But the truth for those people is, all they’ve built for themselves is a beautiful house of cards. There life has no foundation, no structural beams or braces, just a facade of paper held together by avarice dreams.
Brian at A Small Faith is ranting about a recently seen t-shirt with the inscription: “LIFE WOULD BE SO EASY IF EVERYONE READ THE MANUAL†and writes:
Life is not supposed to be easy – The hardships and struggles in life are there because God wants them to be. He planned it that way. He wants us to be molded and shaped in a certain way and to find our need met in Him. In the end, scriptures do not provide a way out of hardship but point a way through it.
Brian is spot on with his post. The Bible and the Christian walk are not about how to avoid the pitfalls in this life but about making it through them leaning on the promises that God has given us. It’s not about how to get through them but knowing that you WILL get through them, and that if you don’t – if this life is cut short – joyfully knowing where you’re going.
“The hardships and struggles in life are there because God wants them to be”. This is one of the most perplexing truths to anyone who seeks understanding of God and His mysterious ways. To affirm this is to then have to wrestle with all the pain and suffering one sees in the world -from the child born with no arms and legs to the woman suffering through her husbands adultery and abandonment or the parents whose 16 month old is killed by a drunk driver. Living by faith that our Father delights to do us good in light of these realities is what seperates the true Christian from the play actors. May I be counted among the former.
“God works in a mysterious ways his wonders to perform.
He plants His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.”
Did you check out Brian’s post at A Small Faith? Brian is one of the bloggers that I’ve read for years now. He doesn’t go into long winded dissertations which is one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed his writings. Short and Sweet. He used to have his own individual blog but is now writing with his wife Jenn and 2 friends of theirs.
Thanks for the linkage, Rong. And I appreciate the vantage you took on this. We do think we can figure out how to fit everything together to achieve our wonderfully superficial goals. But life just ain’t like that.
“managed excitement” – Ha! I laughed at that one.