The Good/Hard Life

We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

Romans 5:3-5 (NLT)

When we earnestly and honestly examine the life of Jesus, we realize that his ways seem anything but righ-side-up in our current context. He chose surrender, sacrifice, humiliation, risk, forgiveness, and radical love when no one would have blamed him for self-protecting and self-aggrandizing.

He’s working with a different dictionary than the rest of us. His upside-down life only makes sense in an upside-down kingdom.

He warmly invites us to find a home in this topsy-turvy world where hard can be good, where the high notes sound better alongside the low notes, where brokenness is the prelude to repair.

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is finally setting down the back-breaking, heart-breaking burden of our own definition of “good.”

Those four letters encompass a fathomless depth of dynamic experiences and meaning; we’ve just got to decide to peer inside. When we choose to embrace the stories we’re living and release the stories we wished for, we can know in our deepest places that this good story is being written a God who can’t write any other kind of story. Living the good/hard life in the upside-down kingdom means we no longer need to numb ourselves to the difficult and the dark. We can awaken to the broken-down, miraculous nature of our second-chance lives and begin this very day to live them well to the very end.