You grow up learning about the horrors of the Holocaust, starving children, war, disease, car wrecks, natural disasters, people living in violence, genocide and old people wasting away. You feel sad for your friends whose parents are divorcing or whose mothers lose their hair during chemo. You cry about the hatred that sends planes crashing into tall buildings.
You will, of course, struggle personally, too. You will be hurt by people. You will have to put your pet to sleep. You or people you care about will have scary illnesses, eating disorders, job failures, autistic children, mounting debts and crippling accidents. You will suffer rejection and, at many points, wonder where God is in it all.
But for most of us reading this, in our early years, the good outweighs the bad. Even amid personal struggles and bad news, we have enough to eat, places to live, clothes to wear, people who love us, interesting things to do; laughing children and inspiring music, the color of trees in the fall and the sound of the ocean.
As we grow older, however, the accumulation and frequency of bad news becomes harder to bear. A parent with dementia doesn’t want to leave home. A child’s spouse is abusive. A friend has lost a job. We start reading the obituaries first. We can’t keep up with the cards and casseroles for friends in trouble.
As Christians, we are not immune from any of this. God created us in His image, but we live in a broken world. From the moment mankind left the Garden of Eden, we were never promised lives free of struggle and pain. What we are promised is that God is in the midst of the struggle with grace and love. Knowing this gives us comfort, hope and peace.
On April 12, 2013, my husband Harvey Cosper was a busy, productive attorney. Little did we suspect that was the last day he would ever work. On April 13, after cheering at a grandson’s baseball game, he awakened from a nap unable to walk or use his left hand. He would be fed through a tube for weeks, lose much of his vision, and live in medical institutions for a long time. He would never get to another game without a cane or a wheelchair.
And yet, the joys of life – especially our children, friends and church family – kept us going. There were still so many blessings. The nurses in ICU had to come in and quiet our family because we were disturbing other patients with our laughter, mostly at Harvey’s one-liners.
This is not heroic. We are not different or special or superhuman. We have been depressed, frustrated and sad. We have felt angry at the situation, cried and wanted to give up. We would have wished for a different future. It’s just that the life-changing difficulties did not alter our view of who God is or how he works in this world. We have never been angry with God, because we know that he did not send the blood clot to Harvey’s brain. We don’t ask “Why me?” because life is hard for everyone, especially as we get older. We don’t think “everything happens for a reason,” because a loving God would not give cancer to children or cause mothers to die in car accidents or send soldiers to step on land mines. There is pain in this world, and evil and suffering. We know that from the Cross.
What we also know from the Cross, and what we have learned from our own experience, is that God is here with us every step of the way. During the hardest times, we can either push him away or seize the opportunity to come closer to him. Something good can come out of even the worst circumstances if we look for it - the light out of darkness that we are promised. Harvey and I forget this sometimes and start to lose hope. But then God reminds us of his promises through his Word, through the endless kindness of other people, in prayer and the invisible healing of the soul. In a thousand ways, we have seen and felt his love.
If we were to list all the bad things in life in one column and all the good things in another, the “good” column would always weigh more, because the gifts of God are on the good side.
No one told us life would be this hard. We wish fervently that it weren’t. But Someone promised us that we would have company on the journey. And that has been more than enough to get us through.
