OBSTACLES ON THE WAY

The journey through life, as we all have experienced, is fraught with obstacles all along the way. Life is never, and probably never was meant to be, easy, a piece of cake, as they say. The creation parable certainly makes that quite clear. Once Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden of Eden, they and all their descendants – us – would not have an easy road to hoe through life. Pain and suffering, sometimes daily, would be part and parcel of our existence

Many of the obstacles we encounter along the road that cause us this pain are not of our own making. We just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or we are afflicted with a disease that was not caused by our own willful foolishness or, well, the list goes on. Bad things, sometimes very painfully bad things, happen to good people for reasons that we cannot either fathom or understand or both. They just do, no exceptions – Jesus, for example.

On the other hand, many of those obstacles we encounter are the result of our own free will. We are often our own worst enemy when it comes to how we traverse this journey through life. We know, we know, that the journey will not be easy. We know life will bring us our own fair share of pain and suffering, and for some, more than our/their own fair share. And, again, as much as we would like it to be, there are no exceptions. None, Jesus included.

That is the downside of this journey through life. The upside is that we have learned that more often than not we have become a better person, a stronger person, because of the pain and suffering that we have endured. That is truth with both the suffering that was the result of our own foolishness and the suffering that we in no way deserved but experienced nevertheless.

We have come through it all, and will come through it all again, because God gave and continues to give us whatever grace and strength we need to do so. All we have to do to validate this truth is to look back on the past pain and realize that if it were not for that grace, we would not have made it through. The other truth is that God never allows us to suffer more than we can endure.

We also know in hindsight that God has saved us from pain and suffering that we certainly deserved given our sometimes foolish words and actions. Why God saved us from certain pain will remain a mystery, but we are certainly thankful that God did just that at that moment in our lives.

What we have to do is make certain that we learn from our mistakes and do all we can to prevent ourselves from being our own worst enemy when it comes to making our way through this life. It will make life so much more pleasant.