Reach

Our pastor at church has a point he likes to hammer home about life: "Circumstances should not dictate our faith, it is our faith that should dictate our circumstances."  I have the hardest time with this concept even though I have no doubt that it's true.

No matter how much you do or don't believe in God, you have a life to live. For most of us life is hard. There's just no getting around that. There's no need to list all the challenges here but think back to when you were thirteen (when life was "care free") and start counting forward to today. From pimples and first loves in high school to career decisions after college, to job issues and finances, getting laid off or fired, to your first mortgage, the challenges came and came and came. I know someone who reads this blog who lost a parent in high school, another whose parents informed him they were getting a divorce the day he got accepted to college, someone else who lost a husband to cancer before they could start their family and someone else who struggled for years to have children. What's it all mean? It's not a happy thought but here it goes: pain and suffering are a part of life.

We can stop there and be totally depressed or we can ask, "Why?".  In the context of a universe that seems to show no mercy we can see that nothing could be further from the truth. Listen, we've all been nailed more than a few times but get this: we've all survived. We've lived through these moments. If you are reading this you're still here, which means you're still going, one day at a time. You have a choice now: believe that all the up's and down's of life are random and meaningless things or decide, once and for all, that they have a purpose. It's an important decision. Because if you decide they have a purpose the next question is, "What purpose?", which leads to hope and the ultimate question, "Who's purpose?", which leads to faith.

Faith is a good thing. It's what you had the first time you pedaled without the training wheels and it's what you need each time you reach out to a loving God who will never, not once, fail to reach out to you.