Hope for Life Blog

I was helping clean up my sister-in-law’s yard after a recent wind storm when it happened.  The neighbor’s dog got me.  I knew he was not happy with the chain saw, the activity, and the work going on.  After all, he kept barking at us.  I was carrying a load of wood to the back gate, walking about one foot inside the fence.  All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of this dog trying to jump over the fence.  As I jumped sideways, he managed to extend his head over the fence and catch my arm.

There was not any lasting damage.  My arm was swollen and stayed bruised for a couple of weeks.  The dog was as surprised as I was.  My father-in-law worried about whether the dog should have gotten shots.  Ha, ha.  The neighbors were apologetic.  The yard got cleaned up, and we all stayed several feet away from the fence.

And I thought about how much like life this was.

We all know there are dangerous things in this world.  There is war, crime, and evil.  People steal, lie, gossip, and murder in our world.  We just do not expect it to happen to us.  Until it does.  Tornados, fires, hurricanes, and tsunamis occur around the globe.  We assume those things happen to other people, not us.  Until it does.  We even know intellectually that people get sick, sometimes even sick enough that they die.  We just do not think it will happen to us.  Until it does.

Hard things, bad things, tough things happen.  They happen unexpectedly.  Sometime it is our fault.  Sometimes it is someone else’s fault.  Sometimes it is no one’s fault.  Life happens.  Life goes on.  So how do we cope?  How do we survive?  How do we find hope, peace, joy, and purpose in a world like this?

I have found the answer in God, and so have millions of others throughout the ages.  He will get me through anything this life throws at me.  He has, and He will.  He gives my life hope, peace, joy, and purpose.  And He gives me life forever.  He has done this through His Son Jesus. 

Blessings,

steve

“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.” Maybe you recognize this line from “Hymn to Proserpine” by Algernon Charles Swinburne; I remember reading the poem in a high school English course.

Swinburne, living in Victorian England, felt that Christian piety had sucked the joy out of life, forbidding the very things that bring pleasure to life. He longed for the days of unbridled paganism.

Sadly, Swinburne wasn’t the first person to feel that way about Christianity, nor was he the last. Many look at Christians and see a somber lot, living a life filled with prohibitions. As the old line says, “Everything enjoyable is either illegal, immoral or fattening.”

When you look at Jesus Christ himself, you see something very different. People looked at him and complained that he didn’t follow enough rules. He went to parties with the wrong kind of people. Where other religious men lived ascetic lives, Jesus lived in a way that people accused him of being a glutton and a drunkard. The first recorded miracle that he performed involved providing wine for a marriage feast! Does that sound like a “pale Galilean”?

No! It’s we Christians who have misunderstood what we’re supposed to be. It’s easy to think that saying no to everything is the best way to be holy. Even back in Bible times, this was a problem. The apostle Paul wrote to one church: “Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”?” (Colossians 2:20-21) Even then, some thought that Christians were following a pale Galilean.

In his book A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanuaken wrote:

“The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians—when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.”

If you think that Christianity is about living like a pale Galilean, you haven’t been exposed to real Christianity. The Christian life is a life of joy, not sadness. It is a life of victory, not defeat. It is a life full of passion, not boredom.

Like Swinburne, I have no interest in following a pale Galilean. Unlike Swinburne, I know that Jesus Christ offers abundant life, colorful life, zestful life. Isn’t that what we’d all like to have?