Life is Good. No Really, It Is.

Life is hard, cruel and often unfair, and I'm not just talking about the board game.

The combination of it all caused me to spend the summer wondering whether life is good.

As I wrote in this space back in May,  I couldn't bring myself to wear my favorite t-shirt because I couldn't bring myself to advertise its message that "Life is Good."  At that time, my brother was going through multiple surgeries and 12 rounds of chemotherapy hell, while his wife and three kids watched helplessly.
 
At that time, I'd just hit the 5-year mark on trying to sell the house we left in St. Louis, without success.  The situation is especially ironic because I left there for better opportunities that my continued ownership of that house has pretty much stripped away.

My wife didn't like her job, and it didn't seem that stable anyway. 

Four months later, things haven't changed all that much.  My brother's chemo sessions ended two weeks ago, and we await further news, but otherwise, things are pretty much the same.  Which is to say, things haven't exactly gone according to plan.

Maybe you can relate. 

In some area of life, someone else got something that you deserved.  A loved one suffers, your life feels like a never-ending parade of small catastrophes, and the one thing that could happen that would suddenly make it all ok seems as far away as the horizon.

Maybe you worked hard for that promotion that was promised to you, but it was given to someone else.  Perhaps you've struggled so hard at a goal that the achievement of which just happened to just fall haphazardly in someone else's lap. Or maybe it just seems that, at some cosmic level, other people's dreams come true while yours just don't.

If these things have happened to you, I understand. 

They've all happened to me too, and most of them very recently.

But if there's one thing I've learned through it all, it's that life isn't defined by its worst moments.

I've been reminded of that lesson everytime someone asks me how I'm coping with the ways life is falling apart.  I think about that when I see an old friend I hadn't seen in awhile and am instantly reminded of why I liked them so much to begin with.  I'm reminded of it when a difficult struggle passes.  I become convinced of it in those moments I'm doing the exact thing I'd most like to be doing with the people I love most. 

The memories that truly linger in our souls are the ones that bring us joy, because God wired that to be the currency of our lives.  

Even if these moments don't occur as often as we'd like, the fact that better times are out there somewhere itself represents hope.

I try not to get too preachy in this space, because there are a million places you can go to find that sort of thing already.  But here's the deal:

In my darkest moments, it used to bother me that God put didn't ask us if we wanted to be put here before placing us on this Earth.  After all, if life is imperfect and struggles are inevitable, it doesn't seem fair that we don't get a choice whether to sign up.  Sometimes I've felt like a puppy whose master threw it unsuspectingly into the deep end of a pond and then expected me to be thankful upon being helped to the shore. 

But that's not really the God in whom I believe.  I don't believe in a God who seeks our dismay, but I do believe in a God who'd rather walk in the desert with us than put us on the beach alone. I believe in a God who doesn't always answer my questions about tomorrow but always is there to help me make it through today.

More than anything, I believe in a God who loves me--and everyone else too.  I've seen too many examples of it in my own life to think otherwise, even when there are things I can't explain. 

And I just can't believe in a loving God who would give us life if that life wasn't good. 

To be clear, life is full of broken dreams, disappointments and injustices against which we spend our better moments fighting.

But where there is love, life is good. Not because life always meets our expectations, but because there are people who always love us anyway.

When I posed the question in this space three months ago as to whether life was good, it never occured to me that I'd already covered the issue in a prior post. 

When I re-read that post a few days ago, I knew I'd already answered my own question.  So if you'll indulge me, I'll speak again here now as to why I've come to believe life is good, despite everything that isn't:

Today, the birds sing. The sun shines. It sets and returns tomorrow. And more often than not, I don't even notice.

A chirping bird might not seem like much when life is falling down around you. But its symptomatic of a greater truth. Despite its imperfection, the world is filled with beauty, if only we will look for it.

Someone around you loves you, warts and all. Someone else around you loves you more than you know, but doesn't know how to say so.

There is some bigger purpose that you care about more than yourself. Through struggles beyond what seem fair, love overcomes, because God created no force more powerful.

These are the things that matter.

When life feels like more than you or I can handle, there is someone who will listen, who has been through something like it before.

At some point, someone did you a favor for no expectation of a return, just because it was the right thing to do. Someone else forgave you for something stupid you did, and that mistake you learned from made you better for the experience.

And even on a day when we feel like life's garbage dump, someone around us celebrates something wonderful in their own seperate world. And some day, we will too.

Our problems are just a drop in the bucket of life. It's tapestry is greater and more beautiful than our temporary circumstances.

(As U2 has taught us):

                     What we don't have, we don't need it now. 

                     What we don't know, we can feel it somehow.

                     It's a beautiful day.

                     Don't let it get away.