Just Keep Swimming

 I feel as if I have forgotten how to write.

How did I ever write regularly? 

I read things I've written in the past and I wonder how I ever formulated a single sentence, let alone strung several together to continue a thought. 

What is there to offer? What words do I have?

The last several weeks have felt like a continual, steady dripping... reminding me that the world is not as it should be. No... no heavy waves crash against my home at this time, thankfully. But everywhere there are fingerprints of the brokenness of this world. A friend's father dies. A family member struggles with mental health that does not seem to abate. Another couple leaves the faith.

It can be easy on a day like today, when the sun seems to hide behind thick clouds, to feel as if hope is laughable. Why even keep flipping through the worn, thin pages of God's word daily? Why crowd our family of 7 into our usual pew each Sunday? Why continue to reach out to God when, at time, there seems to be no apparent fruit?

I've been reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy, and in it he discusses his own definitions of optimism and pessimism. He says Christianity solves the problem of both- an optimist looks at a situation or person and declares it all, "good," naively overlooking the faults and flaws and areas in desperate need of improvement. A pessimist, by his definition, does the opposite. Nothing is good. All is bad. All is in disrepair. No hope on the horizon.

But Christianity? Christianity allows room for true love and loyalty- love and loyalty that can look at a person or a world and say, "I love this so much that I care to see it improve." Here, now, we have room to have skin in the game without being tied to the results. We can be in the world and not of the world. We can fight for improvement because we aren't blind to the flaws and because we love enough to care for change.

These are the answers. I return to God's word because, as the disciples said at the end of John 6, "to whom shall we go? You have the answers of eternal life." God's word has an answer for suffering and affliction that isn't found anywhere else. We are promised in this world that we will have trouble, and yet our kind Lord does not leave us there.

Why do we sit with broken people each Sunday morning, hearing the word preached and taking the cracker and juice? Because these are the people with whom we will spend eternity. These are our co-laborers, our compatriots, the ones we need on this pilgrimage to look us in our weary eyes much like Help in Pilgrim's Progress and to pull us out of the Slough of Despond. 

Why continue to cry out to God? Because, as Isaiah 55:6 says, when we seek him, we find him. We are changed as we grow in dependence in Him. We are strengthened, renewed, and comforted. No other worldview or religion has an answer for affliction or a purpose for suffering. But God promises in Romans 5, that suffering produces perseverance, character, and hope that will not put us to shame. 

So- carry on, weary pilgrim. I leave you with Paul's words.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. >For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. (2 Cor. 4:16–5:5)