Williams/williams
Life can be amazingly hard.
‘Ah, Mark, duh?’
No, seriously. I am not sure any of us know, when we start out, how hard it will be. We hear being a Navy SEAL is hard. When we get married, we say a vow of for better or worse and at a young age and have a beautiful partner standing across from us, of course we are going to say ‘yes’ when the minister asks us if we will take that person-for better or worse.
Look at them! They want to be with meeee! They want to sleep and laugh and have the sex with meeee!
…if I ever told….
As a writer for this magazine, I don’t remember if I ever told this story in Patheos before. I might have, but I don’t want to go back and look and it applies here anyway so let’s just use it again.
Just for a quick background, I am a retired widower. I tell you that because it gives you an idea of where I am on the Earth’s timeline–closer to the end than to the beginning. My wife, Joni, died in the Spring of 2018 after a monster long battle with cancer. But right before that end, she was in remission and there was a chance the stem cell transplant would work. So, Joni was home, bald, with an assortment of scarfs, and she wanted to go to an wedding of the daughter of some church friends. So, our oldest daughter and I took her. It was a beautiful outdoor venue and she did great.
Until the groom read his vows.
…he had long hair.
I shall wipe your tears with my hair, he said somewhere in those vows. Yes, he had long hair. Joni was sitting between my daughter and I and I think we were towards the front, on the end incase Joni had to make a quick restroom exit. As soon as the groom put a period on that sentence, there was a noise of laughter—short—concise—perfectly timed by my wife. HEP! As my daughter and I both slowly turned to the source of the noise between us, there Joni was, in her beautiful scarf covering her bald head, covering her mouth like she burped.
It was perfect.
The young virile man and his beautiful bride, did not know what they were stepping in to. Very few people do when they answer that question. Unless you are coming from a part of life, maybe years down the road where you have actually lived a life, and experienced it, it is hard to know what those words mean. You step in because you are attracted to each other and someone asks the other if they want to spend the rest of their lives together and the other says sure, why not.
I have found myself….
I have found myself time and time again, almost all of it in the last five years, saying out loud, “how do people do life without God.” I see them; we all do. Some of them do life very very well. They are successful and have houses on top of hills, drive nice cars, have healthy and beautiful children.
As believers….
As believers in Jesus, we look sometimes at them and wonder where we went wrong. Life exhausts us. We age and wrinkle and our joints grow sore. All growing tempted of wanting those people’s lives and sometimes, become almost jealous of their lives. If we have a family, we sometimes drag our lives, our spouse, our kids through month after month, year after year, soccer games, baseball, dance recitals, food stamps not making it far enough, in-laws illnesses, and after a while we are able to look at ourselves with only the look of complete fatigue. I don’t want to dry your tears with my hair or beach towel or the T-shirt I’m wearing. I just want it to end.
But here is what we, as believers, have the rest of the world doesn’t.
We have a God who is so big, so loving, he spread his arms out for us and bought us. He loves us so much, He decided He wanted to save us for, well, Him. When all the world falls away and we are at the end of this life, we might have a funeral with just the pallbearers and the mortician in attendance. They might ask each other for our name, who is this we are standing over. Again, all is right. Because when we go to our God and are allowed to see the massively huge impact we have had on our world, without us even knowing, but faithfully, maybe not all the time, but faithfully, took steps each day. Each day, we found ourselves good and kind and did not see the impact we have made on the world. But we did.
…life without God.
No, I don’t know how people do this life without God. But I remember the words told to me and which hung on an IV pole in my wife’s room and now hangs in my bedroom. A small chalkboard which simply is part of a sentence Be still and know….
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