When Life Is Rough - Part 1
It’s a ruff life in Chula Vista, CA.
What do you do when life is rough? If you’re a follower of Christ, what do you do when your pursuit of Christian maturity keeps calling you onward and upward, to terrain that is steeper and more challenging? If you're a leader, what do you do when criticisms just keep on coming despite your best efforts to be sensitive, to listen well? What do you do when your friends depart or forsake you? What do you do when your job is dissatisfying, or you’re let-go from it?
I don’t know about you, but I find myself turning to cliches, pithy sayings, idioms, axioms, prayer, and lots and lots of Scripture when life is rough. (And lots of talking. Thanks for always listening to me dear husband!)
I’m going to split this into a multi-parter. Here’s part one/cliche one.
Not my first rodeo.
Last summer, we were hosting a coffee-tasting shindig at our house and our housemate (before she was our housemate) asked me if the Christian walk ever gets any easier. I laughed. I didn’t mean to, since it’s not a silly question, but sometimes my reactions are faster than my brain can think about showing some self-control. I told her, “no, but your confidence in the Lord’s faithfulness gets stronger, and your recovery time gets shorter.”
2 Corinthians 10:5 says,
“We are destroying arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”
Sometimes, Satan uses rough circumstances to make us doubt our knowledge of God. Questions are okay, doubts are okay, but don’t stop there, look for the answers. We celebrated Easter last week, and we say “He is risen” over and over again not for vain repetition’s sake, but to get it into our muscle memory to respond, “Jesus is alive.” When life is rough, I have to remind myself that my circumstances do not change the fact that Christ is risen.
Because He is risen, we (who follow Him) get to live in resurrection power, resurrection hope. Because He lives, we have been made alive.
When I asked our missionary friends last summer if they had any concerns returning to Ukraine knowing conflict was on the horizon, they responded, “well, we’ve done it before.” They were in Ukraine in 2014 when Crimea was annexed and have spent the last 8 years ministering to Internally Displaced People/Refugees (IDPs.) The Lord was faithful and moved in power then, and He has not changed.
Hebrews 13 lists several encouragements for believers to keep going. Depending on the English translation, verse 1 says to “keep on loving.” Verses 2 and 16 say, “do not forget.” Verse 3 says, “continue.” Verse 7 says, “remember.”
You know what all those reminders imply? They imply that the original recipients of this letter (believers in the first century) were tempted to give up.[1]
Thankfully, this wasn’t the author’s first rodeo. And so he encouraged the Hebrews, and then he encouraged them some more, to keep the faith, to not forget their knowledge of the living God.
“For He Himself has said,
‘I will never desert you, nor will I ever abandon you,’
so that we confidently say,
‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What will man do to me?’”
Hebrews 13:5b-6
Indeed. The Lord is my helper.
***
And some first century believers did leave the faith. See 1 Timothy 1:19, “keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith.”
