Insights For Life

Our adoption journey has given me many great insights for life. The most recent insight is that I should not expect life to be an easy ride. I know this is not a major revelation to anyone, but somewhere along the line with certain situations I tend to think that I deserve my efforts to be trouble-free. Going into our adoption I very much expected to fill out some forms, get a child referral from an orphanage, accept, and in about a year’s time be able to bring our child home. Our journey has been pretty far from that. And this is also life. Life ain’t easy. There are bumps in the road, mountains to climb, and situations and circumstances that come our way which are completely beyond our capacity to handle or understand. And some people have to endure more in a year’s time than others have to endure their entire life. This leads me to this question that I recently heard, “Why does a loving God allow pain and suffering?” Before I read my Bible, I wondered this too. But no pain and no suffering is what God has told us to expect in heaven where There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain (Revelation 21:4). Yes, this is what we can look forward to when we enter eternity with God . But the Bible shares story after story after story of people who suffered in extreme circumstances during their life. Sometimes the suffering was to produce faith, test faith, or refine faith. Sometimes disaster struck as punishment for sin. Sometimes trials came that produced maturity and wisdom in the one experiencing it. Sometimes the trials came so that the response could become a testimony to others. Some were even persecuted because of their faith, put in prison, and sentenced to death because of it. Jesus sums all of this up in John 16:33 when he says In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. And knowing that makes knowing and believing this all the more important: The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you (Psalm 9:9-10).

There is nothing easy about my friends who yearn and pray for a child to be born in their womb and then suffer months and years of grief at the loss of their dream to have a child of their own.

There is nothing easy about going through a tragic car accident and becoming paralyzed from the neck down as a high school aged ISU fan named Jordan encountered a few years ago. His one request was to meet Jake and so we visited him hospital bedside weeks after the tragedy. There is nothing easy about having nurses shift your body around for you so that you don’t get bed sores because you cannot move even one muscle on your own. There is nothing easy about losing your Dad in the accident and wondering why it was you who lived only to be confined to an electronic wheel chair for the rest of your days.

There is nothing easy about my girlfriends who have already had to endure the loss of their mothers due to cancer. Their children will never meet their Grandma.

There is nothing easy about being persecuted by fellow colleagues as an astronomy professor at ISU because you stood up for your beliefs that God made the heavens and the earth. And there is nothing easy about being denied tenure and having to find a different job because of it.

There is nothing easy about suffering from a mental illness that keeps you trapped inside your mind for years and years with no way out and no one who can understand.

And there was nothing easy about this…

And yet, when I hear Jesus say to me Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:27) I still somehow seem to lose my perspective. I must remember that carrying a cross is difficult work. And sometimes the future looks bleak. But there is a better day coming. Just as I envision the joy that will be ours when this adoption journey finally brings home our sweet Samuel, God also tells me that something better is just ahead.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)