Found this quote by Dorothy Sayers, author and defender of the faith, writing on the “whatever-itis” that has plagued this country:
In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.
More to come on this topic…
The video that I’m going to show you is a shocking one. I’ve been surfing the internet via the “next” feature (courtesy of WordPress) and have stumbled across some extreme heresies. Here is a perfect example of one:
My heart has been broken. Sounds like the first line of a(n) country song/teen poem/emo rock group’s title track, and for that, I apologize. But it is true. And the hardest part? She left me for another guy…
The end. I’m not here to write about the woe’s of my life. I’m here to let you know I learned something from it. After she left me, my away messages tended to focus on the “over-you-moving-on” aspect that comes with a breakup. One of those aforementioned away messages said this:
But in the end, the most important thing to accept is that no matter how alone you feel, how painful it may be, with the help of those around you, you’ll get through this too.
Fast-forward a few days and I find myself talking to a good friend about the use of pain in lessons from God. At that exact moment, I have one of those “AH HA!” moments that so often frequent my life. Despite my away messages, despite the songs I played that were filled with either anger or hope of having an entire day absent of the thought of my heartache, I had yet to experience closure. The reason I had yet to even begin to emotionally heal was that I had yet to even begin to grasp why this was going on in my life.
Pain. Doesn’t it seem that life’s best lessons are learned by pain? Stick a wet finger into a socket and see what happens. I’m gonna bet you aren’t going to do that again. Better yet, get two dogs of the exact same breed, potty-train one by simply saying “no” every time (s)he has an accident. Potty-train the other by giving it a swat on its backside each time it has an accident. Which one will learn faster? I believe that it will be the latter canine.
You see? God doesn’t say “no” to us in order to teach us a lesson (at least not very often). He says “no” to close doors on mistakes He just doesn’t want us to make; but when it comes to learning from a mistake or learning how to correct ungodly habits, I firmly believe that God uses pain. I believe that we retain the most amount of knowledge if pain is incorporated into the lesson being taught. It’s like what George Campbell said about the use of pain in teaching a lesson:
Pain of every kind generally makes a deeper impression on the imagination than pleasure does, and it is retained longer in the memory.
J.R. Miller says:
The sweetest things in this world have come to us through tears and pain.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that if little Johnny gets an F on his first math test, you beat the mathematical table into him. Nor am I saying that if your child or significant other hurts your feelings or does something just downright stupid that you should beat them into obedience. I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that I have learned more about Who God is, what He wants from my life, and who I am in His eyes during life’s rough patches than when times are good.
Back to my “ah ha” moment: The above quote that kept frequenting my away messages was the lesson I needed to learn. As I grew closer and closer to H.R., I grew further and further away from the family of friends that loved me unconditionally. Not only that, I began to divorce my own blood-family. I was losing my life’s supporting players, and without them…there is no life. And no matter how many times my brother asked me to hang around after church on Sunday, no matter how often my mother’s voice was seasoned with sadness as she said, “Sure, you can go see her,” I never realized what I was doing. Therefore, I honestly believe that God stepped in. God took away the 6-month-old gift in order for my focus to be on the gifts that are years old and needed my attention in order to perpetuate their longevity. The Fray says it like this:
We’d never know what’s wrong without the pain!
The human nervous system is designed to only allow the brain to recognize one form of pain at a time. Consequently, if you have a paper-cut and a gunshot wound, it will only register the gunshot wound. It’s called “The Gateway Principle.” In the exact same manner, God calls attention to the things in our lives that need immediate care by giving us hard times.
What I’m trying to say is what my dad taught me a long time ago: God acts like a surgeon who has a cancer patient on His table. He is going to have to cut the patient’s body open, and that’s gonna hurt when the patient wakes up. But that pain is necessary in removing the cancerous tumor that will cost the patient his life if it is not taken care of. God causes initial pain (cutting open the body) in order to prevent us from experiencing greater pain down the road (suffering from the cancerous tumor).
In an argument between Dr. Perry Cox and Nurse Laverne Roberts in an episode of Scrubs, my point is summed up by Laverne’s response:
Cox: Are you really trying to tell me that things like New Orleans, AIDS, sugar-free ice cream, crack-babies, Hugh Jackman, and cancer all happen for a reason?
Laverne: ‘God works all things for good.’ Romans, 8:28.
A broken heart sucks. Not learning the lesson is even worse. I am beginning to believe that I wouldn’t have had any “help of those around me” had this happened at a later date. It took pain for me to realize that.
We’d never know what’s wrong without the pain…
There are some things that I just don’t understand. What’s crazy-ironic is that most of the things I don’t understand…I’m afraid of the explanation behind them. I can’t really give a “for instance,” but think of the last time you asked yourself: “Why is this happening?” and the response to your discovery was: “I shouldn’t have asked.” I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. But my life is full of these types of paradoxes.
This was the essence of my previous post. I don’t want an answer as to why certain things in my life just don’t make sense, so I don’t ask “WHY?” out loud. But at the exact same time, I’m dying to figure things out. I want to ask “WHY?”, and I want an answer to that. I just don’t want to hear the answer. I don’t know if I even understand what I’m saying, but I know that this is basically how I feel inside.
I feel this way because I want to be in control of my life.
But the more control I seem to have, the more out-of-control I feel.
I feel this way because I want everything and everyone in my life to be happy, to be good.
Welcome to Humanity. Our motto: “nothing is every perfect.”
I feel this way because I’m scared of not being needed. I love being needed. I thrive on being the ear and the shoulder to others when they just need to talk to someone or have a person to lean on.
Sometimes, the best way to help someone is to let them be.
What’s crazy-ironic is that everything I want to be is exactly Who God should be in my life. It doesn’t matter how messed up everything is. He wants it. He wants everything. The Sick Puppies, secular they may be, sing two lines in their song “All the Same” that absolutely nail Who God is and what He wants:
And I’ll take you for who you are
If you take Me for everything
Things don’t have to make sense to me. I don’t need the answer all the time. I just need to trust Him. I need to believe that my life won’t be any better than when it’s in God’s hands. David Crowder puts it this way:
Letting go gives a better grip
I’m finding everything I’ll ever need
By giving up gaining everything
Falling for You for eternity
Right here at Your feet
Where I wanna be
So in the end, their is an answer to “WHY?”. It goes something like this: “Because right now, this is what is best for you. Believe Me. I’ve seen what comes next. This is what’s best for you.”
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. –Jesus, in John 14.1
Picture for me darkness. I mean, darkness that can be weighed. Darkness that can be felt. Darkness that is so thick it is impossible to walk through. Do you see it? Then go darker.
I was saved in second grade from the sins of forgetting to clean my room and not turning in homework on time. However, as the years progressed and life actually became…life, I found myself not actively living that ‘salvation experience’ that I incurred during my second grade year. I found myself away from God. Then I attended a retreat entitled West Ohio Boy’s Chrysalis. It was a three-day retreat where nothing was told to you ahead of time. “Don’t anticipate, participate,” was the motto for the weekend. Each hour I found myself moving closer and closer to God. The following is the retelling of what I call my Daily Living Salvation.
