Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

poverty

When comfortable becomes uncomfortable

Life is hard for a lot of people I know right now.

My aunt, who is primary caregiver for her daughter awaiting a kidney and her husband recovering from a major accident, recently told someone she was burning the candle at both ends and in between. Hard.

Numerous friends are in the same boat as we are (graduated seminary with no job in sight) and while it’s some consolation to be together, if the boat you’re in is sinking, well, that’s hard.

Others are bearing unimaginable burdens. Hard.

And sometimes I just want life to be easy.

I want someone to cook for me. To clean my house. To watch my kids.

So I can, what? Read a book from start to finish without putting it down? Lounge to my heart’s content? Get flabby? Have a stress-free life?

Maybe. I don’t know.

I’m just a little whiny lately, especially where housework is concerned. I’ve never had a dishwasher, so I spend far too many hours of my life washing dirty dishes. And I’ve been trying to stretch our food supplies by cooking more from scratch, which is better for us anyway but also takes more time. (My husband gave me license to buy frozen breaded fish for our fish ‘n’ chips Opening Ceremonies dinner but I was too cheap to allow it. We had fish and breading in our house. Who cares if it overwhelmed me?) Ditto for hanging clothes on the line instead of using the dryer — takes more time but is better in the long run and saves on the electric bill. (But man am I more tired these days!)

Enough about my virtues. I could spend twice as long talking about my faults.

So I whine about how hard my life is.

And then I read something like this. And I remember that my life is not all about me. Or my comfort.

Then I read something like this, from the Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

Suffering, then joy. Pain, then glory. Jesus didn’t take the easy road. His was the hardest of all.

To wish my life to be anything else is to deny that I walk with Him, desire to be like Him.

It is against all earthly notions to want to suffer. I don’t want to suffer. Or face hardship. Or travel the hard road. Or be uncomfortable. Sometimes I want to be ignorant of the hard stuff and irresponsible in my response to the hard stuff. I want to shut my eyes and escape into a world where children aren’t hungry, marriages are happily ever after, and all is right with the world.

We know all too well that all is not right with the world, and we could spend endless hours arguing about what would make the world “right.”

All is not right with the world. At least not yet.

In Pixar’s WALL-E, one scene sticks in my mind like no other. Late in the movie, we meet the humans, who have abandoned Earth because life was considered unsustainable. They’ve been living in space doing nothing and they’ve gotten flabby and useless. But they discover that Earth can support life again, so the captain wants to go back. The ship’s computer tells him that he’ll survive if he stays on it. And here it is: The captain says, “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.”

Survival isn’t always easy, but sometimes it’s like life on auto-pilot. Just getting by, getting through.

Living isn’t easy, either. But it’s life.

And there’s something powerful and moving and inspiring about choosing to live, not just survive, even and especially when life is hard.

Life is not comfortable for me right now. But it’s life. And I’m thankful for it.

And someday it will get better. Maybe soon. And maybe not.

But it will get better.

In the meantime, I’m trying my best to choose life. And enjoy it.

Great ex-temptations

I’d love to tell you that week 2 was a great success, a triumphant victory, a jumpstart to the My Loss Their Gain campaign.

Not so.

I spent the week at Rock River Bible Camp, one of my favorite places on earth, counseling at a camp for high schoolers. I had the best of intentions to start the week, and actually, I didn’t do too bad. I skipped the chips at the first meal, chose a Rice Krispies treat over a brownie for dessert and ate a 100-calorie fudge bar during snack bar duty instead of one of the dozen or so candy bars that stared me in the face. The next day, I woke up early and ran a mile, then ate two bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios and some fruit for breakfast.

That’s when the week took a turn, both for the better and the worse. By breakfast, we’d lost power and as the day dragged on, it looked like we weren’t going to get it back anytime soon. The kitchen staff got creative with meals. We used buckets of river water to flush the toilets. We improvised chapel times to use the most daylight we could. By day’s end, we had enough generators to power some of the camp, but not all of it. So, we had showers, but no hot water. And no fans for sleeping at night.

It was a great experience for this challenge, in light (pun intended) of the electricity availability in Liberia, which I’ve heard is unpredictable at best. Some of the kids complained about the circumstances, which reminded me again of how little we know and think of the rest of the world.

While at camp, I also began reading “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger,” a book published the year I was born. Even though its statistics are outdated, its arguments, so far, are compelling. I was particularly struck by this quote from the book, especially on our day without electricity. It’s a quote from another book, “An Inquiry into the Human Prospect” by Robert Heilbroner.

“The world is like an immense train, in which a few passengers, mainly in the advanced capitalist world, ride in first-class coaches, in conditions of comfort unimaginable to the enormously greater numbers crammed into the cattle cars that make up the bulk of the train’s carriages.”

We should have been grateful that we had water, even if it was cold, and that our situation had a forseeable end.

No power meant the ice cream bars in the snack bar freezer were fair game, so we hawked them like a ballpark food vendor. I ate two ice cream bars myself. I’m not proud of that. Over the next couple of days, I ate dessert at both meals, something I had hoped to avoid. Camp food is delicious and abundant and I am sometimes weak.

Tuesday, our electricity was back. I avoided the nacho cheese on taco day and didn’t eat an afternoon snack, but the desserts were again part of my diet and I had popcorn that night.

Wednesday morning I ran 1.6 miles and skipped lunch because my family came to visit.

My notes for the rest of the week only get worse. Desserts, candy bars, second helpings of monkey bread, garlic bread and lasagna. Add to it all small amounts of sleep and massive amounts of coffee and I think, diet wise, this week was a total disaster. Since I’m not at home, I’m not going to weigh myself this week to see the damage because I like the scale to be a controlled factor.

Here’s what I learned, though:

The Bible says, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” — 1 Corinthians 10:13.

I was faced with major temptation for food this week. God provided ways out, but I didn’t take them. I knew going in that I would be tempted to overeat, but I didn’t take steps to protect myself from it. I will have a better plan next time.

This week, I face similar challenges. When I’m not in control of the food that’s available for lunch or dinner, I have a hard time eating healthily and in proper portions. It’s also supposed to be scorching hot and I have a lot of places to be and things to do this week that probably won’t allow for much exercise.

I had hoped to give you hope that I’m starting on the right foot.

The journey continues.