Into Every Life ...

I know that you’ve heard the phrase “sometimes you’ve just got to take the good with the bad.”  Or sometimes it’s said this way … “into every life sometimes a little rain must fall.”  It doesn’t matter how you say it, the knife always ends up cutting both ways.  We all know that the basic sentiment of the various ways of saying it is true, but it doesn’t matter who says it, or why they’re saying it, or what the circumstances are … the end result is we flat out just don’t like it … period!  We always seem to want to be able to both have our cake and be able to eat it too.  Why do you think that is?

I would suggest that the reason is because we’re fallen creatures, and that as such, truth is never something that will come easy to us … especially when that truth happens to come in the form of something unpleasant.  The fact that we like things to go well doesn’t surprise me in the least.  Now I know what you’re thinking … you’re thinking that everybody knows that so of course it shouldn’t be a surprise.  As kids today would say … it’s sort of a “duh”!  But I mean more than that when I say I’m not surprised that we always like for things to be pleasant.

The fact is, we were created by God so that we would be able to experience the pleasantness of His creation.  On the first day of creation, after God had created the light, He said that it was “good”.  And on the third day, after He had created the earth and seas, He saw that it was “good”.  And after creating the plants again it was “good”.  The sun, moon and stars were “good” and the birds were “good” and the beasts of the earth were “good”, etc., etc.  And finally, after He created mankind, when He looked out on everything that He had created, God declared that it was “very good”.  This is why I say that I’m not surprised by the fact that we expect things to be good.  We were created with the expectation that this world that we live in should be good.  We were created with an expectation that things should go well … that things should be pleasant.

Now, however, it’s time to get back to the other half of the equation.  Why is it that we always struggle so hard with the notion that sometimes things don’t go well?  I think that the answer to that comes both from the first point already made, and from the reason then why things don’t go well.  If we were created to live in goodness, then by definition, we weren’t created to live in “non-goodness”.  Non-goodness is not a state of being that was meant for us … consequently it is not a state of being that we could or even should ever be comfortable with.  There is one other reason why difficulty is not something we’re comfortable with, and that is because of why difficulties are now a part of creation … and that reason is sin.

I have an antique schoolhouse clock in my office that used to belong to my dad.  For several years it used to work quite wonderfully, as long as I wound it up once a week, and as long as I adjusted what time the hands were pointing to once in a while.  Then one day I made the mistake of adjusting the hands by winding one of them backwards … and ever since then I have not been able to get the clock to keep the correct time at all.  I’ve taken it to a clock repair guy, but it still doesn’t work.  When Adam and Eve sinned, they introduced discord into God’s otherwise “good” creation; and once that happened, there was simply no turning the clock back.

I think the major reason why we humans don’t like it when things go wrong is because every difficulty in life becomes a reminder that something is wrong … with the world … AND with us.  So we tell ourselves that sometimes the rain must fall … but we don’t like it.  And we tell ourselves that you have to take the good with the bad … but we don’t like it.  No matter how many different ways we try to pretend that life has to have both the good and the bad … it just doesn’t sit well with us … because it shouldn’t.

Don’t ever settle for second best.  You and I were not created to live in a fallen-down, broken-down, muddled-up, fuddled-up world.  We were created to live in glorious harmony with our Creator and His creation and with one another.  And that’s why Jesus came to this broken-down world … He came to die on the cross so that He might save us from our sins.  He came so that those who believe in Him might have new life, and so that one day when He comes again to take us to heaven, we might enjoy forever that “goodness” that He created us for in the first place.