Stranger than fiction

I was just thinking the other day how sometimes it's so easy to get the "grass is greener on the other side" syndrome and start thinking that everyone's life looks so much easier than my own. I've often thought lately that my own life seems "stranger than fiction." At times it feels like so many things in my life have just been so odd—like my older sister's handicap, my dad's unemployment, my mom's chronic illness, my medical trip to New Mexico, an unplanned pregnancy. I look around at the people around me and think, "Why does no one else seem to be struggling with such strange things in life?"

What a limited perspective! I forget that no one's life is exactly smooth sailing. Suffering and hard times touch everyone, from the richest celebrities to the poorest people on the streets. It's a plain old fact of our humanness. When I look at the people around me, it's easy to miss the pain, the struggles, the hurts that they carry everyday from both the past and the present. No one's immune to difficulties.

Last night I was reading one of my devotional books from Joni Eareckson Tada, who quite frankly, is one of my heroes as well as one of my favorite authors. This particular devotional book is called 31 Days toward Overcoming Adversity. As I read this passage, God's simple truth hit me over the head:

The sufferings we encounter in life—even the garden-variety sort of daily trails—are meant to help us partake of Christ. For when we enter the fellowship of His sufferings, God strips us of our "self-help" mindset. We are forced to our knees and driven to lean on His grace. Then—and, it seems, only then—can God impart His Son's character to us. In so doing, we are "made like Him."

Rather than complaining about the struggles and hard things that God brings into my life, I should be seeing them as gifts from God, opportunities to become more like Him and share in fellowship with Him. After all, Scripture tells me to "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds."

Lord knows that I need a fresh perspective every day, every minute, every second. But rather than acting the part of the martyr, I hope to remember that "in every situation, God is doing a thousand things that you cannot see and you cannot know."

Stephanie

(Just for fun, here's Dan and me at White Sands, New Mexico. It was so beautiful! And no, it's not a beach, just miles of perfectly white sand dunes.)