Bye, Bye, 2008, You Bag of Crap, You....

I have to say that 2008 was pretty much the worst year of my life. So far, anyway. General unhappiness reigned.

So yeah, 2008 sucked. CS Lewis’s book THE PROBLEM OF PAIN has helped a bit. He’s pretty phenomenal at putting a decent spin on this sort of thing. It’s been fairly easy for me to wonder why in the world this stuff seems to be happening to me. So why has God just abandoned me? Why wouldn’t he help me through all of this? Why no magic want to fix the problems???

Well, he hasn’t abandoned me. And eventually I came to my senses, or at least had a moment of clarity about it. A lot of this has been the result of my exercising free will. If I hadn’t opted to do certain things, I wouldn’t be suffering. Sure, God could have exerted miracles and pulled me out of it, but I learn best the hard way, unfortunately. It’s the product of a low IQ, I have no doubt. I’ve got to be knocked to my senses sometimes. So he’s let me experience the bad stuff, and used it to his advantage to better me. Sometimes as a parent, you have to allow your kids to do stupid stuff in order to learn better. And sometimes those lessons hurt. It’s kind of like jumping off the house when you were a kid, and discovering the hard way that gravity’s law was not going to be abolished just for you. (What, you never did that? Maybe it WAS just me.)

But I also have a peace about things that I didn’t have before. A lot of it comes with the realization that much of what has happened is now out of my control, if it ever was to begin with. I’m not necessarily asking for what I want to happen to come true. I’m more asking for peace about what is to happen. There’s mention in the bible that man cannot add a single hour to his life by worrying, and that’s true. So the trick is to be at peace with what God has in store. Nothing I can do can affect what anyone thinks or feels about me. Instead, I need to just be at peace with what is to happen, since there’s not a darn thing that I can do about it anyway.

It’s just no fun waiting, sometimes. And it’s relatively easy to want my will to be done, as opposed to his. But my perspective is pretty much narrow compared to his. But the thing that keeps me going is the promise that good things are in store for me down the road.

“I’ve been stumbling through some dark places, but I’m following the plow. I know I’ve tumbled out of your good graces, but it’s all right now....”