Today I want to continue the previous blog, LIFE IS HARD. There’s a reason why Staples (staples.com), the office products store, has designed all of their advertising and promotion around the “easy” theme. According to their website, they make everything easy. The appeal of making everything easy makes a lot of sense. Given the complexity of our high-stress, high-tech world, everyone is looking for ways to make life easier. Whether Staples can produce on the promise of their “easy button” is up to each consumer to decide. Are you buying what they’re selling?
We all wish we had an “easy button” we could push on demand to help us cope with the really hard things we encounter in our everyday lives. The “American Dream”, which sets us up to expect life to be comfortable, convenient and happy, contributes to an expectation that things are going to go our way. There are some in Christian circles who go so far as to suggest God promises to give us the life of our dreams if we’ll have faith, live righteously and pray the right prayers. That would have been a tough sermon to preach when I visited Honduras a couple of years ago, and was sharing with people who lived on $900 a year. BTW, they were people of great faith, hope and love, even though they didn’t have all the things many of us equate with happiness in life. Makes a person go, “Ummm!” Maybe they’ve discovered something many of us are missing.
In today’s blog I want to address the following question: “What happens if we expect life to be easy and it suddenly becomes hard?”
First, and I mentioned this in the previous blog, we’ll find ourselves unprepared for the disappointment which comes from dealing with hard things. In my experience, one of the most damaging effects of disappointment is disillusionment. We see both of these strong emotions in the words of Job, as he struggles to process all that he is going through. David deals with similar emotions in Psalm 73, and even a dose of despair, as he tries to understand why his life is going so bad, all while evil men are experiencing the life of his dreams.
Second, what we do with the disappointment, disillusionment and despair associated with life suddenly becoming hard, is a serious concern. Many times, in the confusion of our thoughts and emotions, we begin to reach wrong conclusions and make poor decisions. There is a certain level of irrationality which often accompanies our confused state. It’s at that this point we may being making decisions which carry consequences that will linger in our lives long after the hard times have passed. We look for the “easy button”, or a way to escape as quickly as possible. For some people this involves turning to substances, making radical changes in their relationships (getting in or getting out of a significant relationship), and/or making rash decisions regarding the big things in their life (career, school, church, etc.). It’s ironic that the motivation for making such changes is to make things easier or better, and what it usually does is make things even harder. The devil is a liar and if you’re following his advice it’s never going to turn out good in the end.
Third, when were going through hard times, we often feel very isolated and alone. There’s a great temptation to look around at others and how things are going for them, and to conclude that we have it worse than anyone else. I don’t mean to diminish what you’re dealing with today in any way, but the truth is everybody’s life is hard. Everybody is facing something so challenging, they want to give up. This is how I see it, everybody has either just come through hard season, or they’re currently in a hard season, or they’re getting ready to enter into some difficult days. If we believe what Job writes in 7:1-3, it’s what each of us has been allotted or assigned. In our humanness, we tend to ask: “Why me?” A different question is: “Why not you?”
In my next blog I want to deal with the question: What happens if we live with an expectation that life is going to be hard? Look for it on Thursday or so.
John 16:33 NIV "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."
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