"Life is Difficult." M. Scott Peck
But why should that be? Why is life so confusing, convoluted and mysterious? Why do human beings uniquely seem to have this dilemma that there should be more?
"And here's where we run into a problem.
For most of us, life feels like a movie we've arrived at forty-five minutes late.
Something important seems to be going on . . . maybe. I mean, good things do happen, sometimes beautiful things. You meet someone, fall in love. You find that work that is yours alone to fulfill. But tragic things happen too. You fall out of love, or perhaps the other person falls out of love with you. Work begins to feel like a punishment. Everything starts to feel like an endless routine.
If there is meaning to this life, then why do our days seem so random? What is this drama we've been dropped into the middle of ? If there is a God, what sort of story is he telling here? At some point we begin to wonder if Macbeth wasn't right after all: Is life a tale "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?
No wonder we keep losing heart.
We find ourselves in the middle of a story that is sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, often a confusing mixture of both, and we haven't a clue how to make sense of it all. It's like we're holding in our hands some pages torn out of a book. These pages are the days of our lives. Fragments of a story. They seem important, or at least we long to know they are, but what does it all mean? If only we could find the book that contains the rest of the story.
Chesterton had it right when he said, "With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand." (John Eldridge, Epic, 7-9)Email Subscription:
I know the Book, don’t you?!
Did you ever wonder if Abraham felt, when he raised the knife to kill his son Isaac, as if he were “holding in his hand some pages torn out of a book”? Perhaps a horror novel!? What about Moses when he, the stutterer, was given the choice by God to be God’s voice to Pharaoh in order that he, the king of Egypt, would “set My people free”? Perhaps a comedy of errors!? What about Naomi? A widow whose two adult and married sons had died leaving her not only an alien in a foreign land but a woman with no one to provide for her except her Moabitess daughter-in-law named Ruth, who refused to leave her mother-in-law and returned with her to an uncertain future to a land in which she would now be an alien? Perhaps a modern-day “soap opera” like “Days of Our Lives” or “The Young and the Restless”!?
Perhaps, along with knowing the Book from which the pages have been torn, we also need to know the Author who has written and continues writing the Book containing the pages that we hold in our hands as well as the pages that Abraham and Moses and Ruth and Paul and even “His only begotten Son,” Christ Himself, held in their hands.
As Robert Frost said in his poem “The Road Not Taken,” “…that [will make] all the difference.”
In his Epiphany Sunday sermon yesterday, my pastor encouraged each in the congregation to enter into a year of Epiphanies, a year filled with “aha God-moments”; and he suggested that a deeper and more frequent study and reading of the SCRIPTURES, a more regular and frequent attendance at WORSHIP services, and a more joyful and cheerful GIVING of self in service to others would be three ways in which each would discover and experience his or her own “aha God-moments.”
Studying and reading, reading and studying the SCRIPTURES, especially in Bible study classes such as a Disciple class when being taught and challeneged by a knowledgeable and intuitive pastor-teacher, enables not only a knowledge of the Book from which the “pages have been torn” but also a “knowing” of the Book’s Author and why He chose to write the Book.
Such studying and reading and reading and studying also illuminates the “big picture,” of which the indiviual pages are just a small but integral and important part, because they contribute to the whole, which we know consists of sixty-six books divided into the Old and New Testaments. They contribute to proving not only God’s purpose and plan; but they prove that God does, in fact, have a purpose and plan for each individual life within His “big picture.”
In his play “As You Like It,” Shakespeare wrote: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances….”
The next question — at least for me — with which we must deal, once we know the title of the Book and the Author of that Book, is “How — because ultimately the choice is ours — do we choose to act-out our lines in the short time we are on stage?”