How can so much ‘good’ come out of ‘bad’ in life?

Here’s a mystery about life: why is it that some of our most difficult experiences produce the greatest growth, maturity and succeses for us? Here’s another one: why do two different people go through nearly identical experiences, and one comes out of it a better person while the other one ends up bitter, twisted and wreaked?

I think there might be something very important to discover about life in the answer to these questions.

In fact, this may be a primary key to unlocking our capacity to be transformed into the person we were created, and then rescued by Jesus, to be! Hard things in life are everywhere; we can’t avoid them. Bad things happend to good people all the time. If we can understand what is going on, and how to live our lives so that these things produce life instead of death in us, that has got to be a good thing!

Here’s the punch line: the answer has everything to do with the Cross.

What we ‘do’ does matter.

There are two common, yet confusing ideas that make it hard for would-be disciples of Jesus to feel that they can actually be successful at this Christianity thing.

The first one is the “my behavior saves me” idea. This thought (or belief) leads you to live with the burden of performing for God so that He will observe your behavior, find it acceptable and then be obligated to reward you with … (eternal life, short-term rewards, etc.). In other words, I did what He required so He will do what He promised.

The second one is usually the aftermath of trying to live by the first; I call it the “my behavior has nothing to do with what saves me” idea. This idea is often the aftermath of the first one, because after a good, hard time of trying to perform for God it becomes evident that bad things do happen to good people, the experience of the joy of God’s presence doesn’t seem to directly correspond to our diligence and discipline in religious things, etc. It begins to feel like what I do in my daily life makes little or no difference —in fact, life gets harder, I percieve myself as less ‘holy’, less ‘redeemed’, less ‘spiritual’ the more I try to serve God and perform for Him. If and when God does bring good into my life, it seems to be totally capricous and without any correlation to what I do or how I live (this is really closer to the idea of ‘luck’ than anything else).

There may be more to this ‘Christianity’ thing than you thought.

Growing up in a Christian family, my views of God, myself and the world around me were pretty well dominated by my experiences and impressions of church. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I’ve met and know a lot of really nice people in church. Still, my church experiences (church meetings, church sermons and Sunday School lessons, church relationships, church conflicts) were a pair of glasses affecting what and how I could see.

God seemed to be small enough and limited enough to be constrained within the priorities and practices of our church and the lives of these people. God really didn’t seem to have much interest in more than us, our meetings, our church building, etc. I know this sounds strange, even egotistical, as though we were the center of everything. Really it was that I had seen and understood so little of what God was up to that I thought we were mainly ‘it’ for him.

With a few more years, a few more experiences with God, and a lot more time learning to think through the biblical material, things look very different!

Something is terribly wrong.

If you have very much exposure or involvement in modern, Western religious communities (notably Christian ones) you may have noticed a strange and troubling phenomena; these people often don’t do very well at ‘practicing what they preach!” Or more accurately, they struggle to practice what has been preached at them.

This situation produces awful fallout. The non-religious (or at least non-Christian) onlookers are generally unimpressed with the high sounding claims to truth and divine revelation brandished by these supposedly ‘born again, Spirit-filled, children of God.’ And, equally sad is the state of apathy and discouragement that these believers sink into as they find that their hopes and expectations for ‘new life’ are dashed on the rocks of their relatively unchanged lives.

Welcome to my blog

I’ve set up this blog as a way to ruminate on things important, theological, practical and pressing on God’s people as we try to find our way together into His good purposes.

Feel free to respond to my ramblings with your own thoughts, questions, comments.

Remember, together we can accomplish what we could not do alone.