Last night my wife and I were both cast down for the same reason (which I will not discuss), and engaged in a pity party for a couple of hours. Normally, when one of us is down, the other helps to lift us up. But that did not happen last night.
I am not sure that this is wrong. Occasionally I think we need to scrape the bottom of our feelings and give vent to some expression of gloom, or resentment, or fussing. We have learned not to put a happy face on inner injuries, like putting makeup on a bruise, as if the bruise did not exist. Life is real, and sometimes life hurts. We are not supermen that nothing can touch. Looking at life frankly is a part of reality, and only when we face life as it is can we find solutions that will lead us out of that valley of gloom. We want the sunshine, not an artificial light that masks our inner darkness.
Life is real, and sometimes life hurts
We do not always walk in obvious victory. Sometimes our “victory” looks like a lumpy endurance: we will not stay down on the mat. We get up. We get each other up, and like two drunks, keep each other from falling.
We are cast down, but not in despair. The task we have been given, as long as we have heard no word of countermand, we keep on doing, day by day, week by week, as long as we have strength. We take the breaks we can: we stop for a moment and take our “minute vacations,” breathing and looking out over a peaceful landscape, or watching the varying flight of birds, or walking out on the back lawn to look up at the sky. I wrote a poem once about prisoners in a gulag that looked up at a skylark singing high in the air: like that.
We are not in a gulag. Life is better than that. And we have each other to share in the experience and support the other – and thus grow in strength ourselves. We are told to hang on. One of the definitions of the saints is that they persevere. We will persevere. The journey is not forever. We look forward one day to the review of our actions and attitudes before One Who cannot be mistaken. We hope for approval. We seek to act in such a way that will guarantee that approval.
Everything works together for good, said a man whose tribulations were incomparably more difficult that ours. We look at life with our “for-goodness” glasses on, and reckon that the God Who loves us (and Whom we love) is working in us a far greater glory than seems apparent at present.
as we try to plow up the ground. Who knows what “sons” we will have
I think sometimes of the missionary who worked for decades in Africa and garnered only one or two sorry converts, and retired. His son went as well there, and oversaw the conversion of thousands: the father had laid a foundation on which the son had built. We may be that father, plodding day by day in that donkey-like patient obedience as we try to plow up the ground. Who knows what “sons” we will have, and what they will do?
We rejoice by faith in what we expect God will produce, using even our stumbling, paltry-seeming, efforts. We keep on keeping on, because what other legitimate options do we have? And our own experience of God deepens, and that by itself makes it all worthwhile. May God continue to deepen our walk with Him.