C'est La Vie

I ran across the game of Life the other day and I had to smile. The game of Life is definitely that: a game. I think you have to make three decisions in that game, and you usually get to see how either option ends up before moving forward. Everyone gets married. Everyone buys a house. Almost everyone is a millionaire by the end of the game. Yes, that is definitely a game and not real life.

Tomorrow my grandma is having open heart surgury. It will probably be a triple or quadruple bypass, but they have to wait and see until they get in. She's eighty years old. Eighty year old grandmas sometimes don't make it through quadruple bypass surgury. That, my friends, is life. The real one, not the game.

Here's more real life: I have lots of friends looking for jobs, or who live paycheck to paycheck. I have friends who have lost parents, and friends who have lost babies. I have friends who have to live with the bad choices they or someone else made. Life is rarely easy or fun, but amazingly, it is good. How do I know it's good? Because God is good, and every life is a gift from Him.

I must admit that sometimes I'm not grateful for God's gift, at least not in the moment. Think back to when you opened Aunt Agatha's gift on Christmas morning and found out that it was underwear. Not a whole lot of enthusiasm there. There was a lot of things you wanted for Christmas, and underwear didn't make it on the list. Or on the back up list. Or on any list. And yet to be honest, we need underwear, we really do. It might not be fun or exciting, but it's used every day, isn't it? Most people don't like the useful gifts as much as the fun gifts, even if they need the useful gifts and use them more. That's because we would rather enjoy ourselves than have something useful, because usefulness is rarely exciting.

Don't we treat God's gifts the same way? He gave us our lives, yet a lot of what He gives us in them does not seem like a gift. We are faced with hard situations, difficult decisions, and choices that are anything but easy. God's gifts seem like underwear. The gifts aren't fun and exciting, but they are what we need if we are willing to admit that. If God gave you a new Ford Mustang it would be great, yet it would hardly help you learn the lesson of perseverance that would occur if you had to save up month after month for one yourself. God knows what we need now and what we will need in the future, and doles out gifts accordingly. Humans are into instant gratification; God isn't. Because of that, we start thinking that God's gifts aren't gifts at all. We start doubting God because we only see a small piece of the pie and it doesn't make any sense to us. That's when the devil has us. If he can get us to doubt God's working, he can feed us all sorts of lies and we'll believe him. We'll start doubting God's character, be jealous and envious of others, feel sorry for ourselves, get angry, etc. And then we're in trouble.

There's an easy way to avoid all that mess, though. It simple: believe the truth. Here's the truth: God loves you and is working for your good and His glory in all things. You might not see it, you might not feel it and you might not like it, but it's the truth. You have to hang onto that, Beloved, as if your life depends on it, because it does. You have to believe what God says is true, or else the devil will sift you like wheat in an instant. I know it's hard. Believe me, I know. There have been days, weeks, months where I couldn't see the light. Where I still can't see the light. I didn't understand why I had to go through this or that. I wanted to give up because I didn't see the point in fighting anymore, but God wouldn't let me by His grace.

I know that many of you have gone through much harder things than me. I only know a small part of your pain, of your hardships, of your struggles. But I do know this: you can make it with God by your side. There is a point to what you're going through, whatever it is. I don't know what it is, but God does. Don't give up, Beloved, or let Satan feed you lies. The Christian walk is a fight and a race. Those are hard things. It's hard to see how things will turn out and it's hard to keep going when it gets tough. But think about the end, Beloved. We do know how that will turn out. "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away." Revelation 21:4.

This life is passing away. What seems like eternity now is really just a brief moment that will quickly pass. We can endure this life because our hope is not in this life, it's in the next. In the the game of Life the ending is retiring in a mansion. For Christians, the ending of real life is actually similar. We get a mansion. In heaven. With Jesus. Forever.