The Hard Days
I sometimes wonder whether or not my inclination toward pessimism flows out of a heart caught between hope and despair.
I am a Christian. I believe that God sent Jesus to live and die in order to pay for my sin and then God raised him up on the third day to secure a future resurrection for myself and multitudes upon multitudes. The gospel should shape my thoughts and emotions and decisions.
SHOULD.
Too often, however, I yearn for something I am not experiencing in the here and now yet very much desire to—peace. Peace of mind. Peace of heart. Peace of thought.
If Jesus really is who the Bible says he is—and I believe he is, peace should govern my existence. Perhaps you’re like me and, upon receiving the truths of scripture, you regard them as incalculably valuable. It is possible to feel that and yet struggle with being hopeful.
Recently, while wrestling with my self-doubt, I unearthed a long-dormant heart issue: sometimes I don’t like myself very much. I don’t mean it in a “I hate myself” kind of way, but as an evaluation of who I want to be versus who I actually am. When I turn inward and consider who I am, my gospel-amnesiac self turns away from where I want to be, forcing me to stand beneath a too-small umbrella with bent ribs and a torn shade as life’s torrents drench me to the bone.
How can I be skeptical, or worse—forgetful, about God’s grace? I believe it. Most often, I trust it.
But why can’t I calm my own heart? It has been transformed by grace, turned from stone to flesh by the life-giving Spirit of God.
In exasperated moments, I remember what the apostle Paul describes as trustworthy - “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”1 It is no accident. It is no coincidence. It is purposeful, intentional, deliberate. God sent Jesus into the world to die and in those questioning moments, my mind cannot process that truth.
Sometimes when I write something, my wife wonders about it because she does not see this melancholy or despair in me. Her question is often, “Are you really so low? So glum?” Kind of humorously, I feel like the line delivered by Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner in “The Avengers” as he explains to Chris Evan’s Captain America, “That’s my secret, Cap’n: I’m always angry,” as he subsequently turns into The Hulk and takes down an alien monster the size of six city buses with a single punch. I’m always fighting against despair.
It isn’t all that bad.
Honestly.
I am a man being transformed into someone new, someone more Christlike. It takes a lot of effort and energy some days. Others, not so much. But because I know who I was and I still have habits and thought patterns ingrained during my younger days (even those days were now 30+ years ago), I can quickly grow disillusioned with myself. I should be farther along in my faith journey. I shouldn’t despair as much. I shouldn’t be so melancholy, so concerned with earthly relationships, with financial stresses, with this, and that, and that…and that, too!
But I am.
The reality is that I am a former sinner being transformed by grace and occasionally, I forget to let grace have its way with and in me. I grab the steering wheel and direct myself where I want to go which is often in the opposite direction. Such choices cause me enormous heartache. I want to be better. Yet somehow, I’m still not there.
My mind ruminates on grace in these moments. I keep Hebrews 2:1 at the front of my mind, “For this reason, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard, so that we will not drift away.”2 Maybe, dear reader, if you are honest with yourself, you find yourself, like me, slightly disillusioned with your own efforts or abilities to stay focused in faith.
Works in progress, we are.
Always have been.
Always will be.
So what do we do with that?
I suppose the options are varied.
The world offers us innumerable opportunities to decide to think differently, whether that’s an outright abandonment of orthodoxy, a seismic shift of belief, or a more sinister recategorizing, reordering, and reprioritizing which elevates second or third order issues to stand with equal import as first order issues, or worse—to supplant the import of first order issues.
We could disengage, deconstructing our faith because of the lack of progress we feel.
We could labor harder, working to see more of Christ and less of ourselves in the mirror.
We could turn in any number of directions to any number of pursuits.
But only one thing is needed—hold to our confession of faith.
“Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful.”3
“Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. And may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will do it.”4
~SDG~
Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash
Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), 1 Ti 1:15.
Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Heb 2:1.
Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Heb 10:23.
Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), 1 Th 5:23–24.