I saw this picture on a friend's FB wall
the other day. I was impressed:
Then my friend Sharon wrote this, today, "The distance between, 'Yay! I'm having
a great day!' and 'Wow, this really sucks,' is very short. Couple of minutes,
maybe, or a few hundred characters."
Wow, can I ever relate.
I need friends to say things like this, because it keeps me grounded,
and it allows me to be human without worrying that my "amazing, ordinary,
and awful" is so far beyond normal.
I'm glad I'm not alone in this, because, honestly, I think one of the
biggest risks of sharing so much life together is that we see each other at our
best and our worst, and sometimes
these moments are only separated by... well... mere moments...
It can be frustrating.
It can be uncomfortable.
Sometimes we don't even know what to do for one another, but I will take
silence that stretches for far too long, followed by an awkward hug, over the
expectation that I should be someone I'm not any day of the week... especially
today. The alternative to this tricky
life of relationships and community is not sharing life transparently. That's not a good alternative.
If you read this page regularly, you know I was completely
fed up with David recently, but somewhere in the midst of all of his running
from people who were trying to kill him and stuff, he penned this, "As for me, I will always
have hope; I
will praise you more and more" (Psalm 71:14,
NIV).
God is a God of hope. But let us not forget that, "hope that is seen is no hope at all.
Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do
not yet have, we wait for it patiently" (Romans
8:24-25, NIV). As a side note, all of
Romans 8 is pretty good...
And so may we jump into life with both
feet, praising more and more in the amazing... in the ordinary... and, perhaps,
just stepping back and allowing the Spirit to intercede (see Romans 8:26-27) in
the awful. May we allow others the same
grace, and may we listen... really listen... to their stories of triumph and heartbreak, recognizing that we are
all the same. We all have this kind of
narrative whether we share it or not.
And God offers hope for every one of us.
L.
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