I'll Take Door #3

Years ago when I was teaching school, I was sitting around with some fellow schoolteachers trading stories about our classroom experiences. One of my friends taught kindergarten and told of a first-day incident with a very precocious kid. They had just returned from lunch and as soon as they walked back into the classroom, this little boy walked over to the center rug and lay down on a comfortable spot. My friend walked over and knelt down beside him, quietly whispering to him, “Honey, what are you doing?”

Without moving a muscle, the boy responded, “It’s naptime. I’m going to sleep.” My friend suppressed a laugh, and then said, “Sweetie, you’re in school now. We don’t have naptime.” The boy’s eyes opened as he looked at her in disbelief. She said, “Really. So go ahead and go back to your seat."

Reluctantly, the boy sat up. After a few moments of reflection, he slowly stood up. As he walked away, my friend could hear the child muttering, “Well, I sure didn’t sign up for this.”

And don’t we all know that feeling?

I’ve had times in my life that I’ve wished I was a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal, bartering with Monty Hall, Drew Carey, or Wayne Brady. I’ve wished he would say, “So, Lynn, do you want to keep your current life, or do you want to trade it for what we have behind Door #3?” And I’ve known I would pitch it all in for Door #3 in a second! To walk away with a pool table and a hanging lamp would be such an improvement!

All week, our Tennessee roads have been icy and our yards have been blanketed in snow. Our children have been out of school an entire week! In Tennessee! This is the South, for heaven’s sake! And it would be charming if we were hearing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…” on our radios, but it’s approaching the end of February and we’re getting tired of this. We did not sign up for this!

But this is such a relatively small thing. Life can hand out much more complicated obstacles that we certainly didn’t sign up for…illness, job loss, financial stress, rebellious kids, and so many other things that don’t feel like something we signed up for.

So what do we do? We’re in awful places in our lives and our options don’t include anything nearly attractive as a new pool table.

Some people begin making truly stupid choices, looking for ways to make the frustration and the inner stress go away. I won’t even begin to list here all of the bad choices a person might make when life becomes complicated…I don’t have to. We see them all around us. Some of us have made those bad choices. And some of us know that those choices just lead to further complications in life.

Our best choice when life gets hard…our only real choice…is the same choice when life is simple: Follow Jesus. We should follow him in the easy times of life; we should follow him in the difficult times of life.

Why? Because Jesus is the Light. He will always show us the way.

“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’” (John 8:12).

Sign up for that.

That Moment When . . .

I love the “that awkward moment” jokes on Facebook. Like, “That awkward moment when someone yells at you for clicking your pen, but you have to click it one more time to use it.” Or, “That awkward moment when someone in the meeting says, ‘Let’s get down to business,’ and you were just about to ask if they think Mister Bates is really in trouble on Downton Abbey.” Or the really cute ones like, “That awkward moment when you realize that Santa has the same wrapping paper as your mom.”

 

Sometimes the jokes come with a picture that really drives the joke home. Often they’re really ridiculous and they beg for me to share them with my friends too. And once in a while they connect with me and I think, “Oh my goodness, I’ve been there!”

Life can be filled with awkward moments. We have to learn to just ride them out with grace. Some of my days are just filled with “excuse me” and “I’m so sorry” as I navigate many awkward moments among people.

But we can also find ourselves in moments that are more than awkward. And those moments may stretch into minutes, and minutes into hours, and hours into . . . well, who knows? Life can be difficult at times and we may find ourselves in storms and dark places that leave us looking for help and longing for light.

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, we find the story of a woman who had been in a dark place for twelve years. She had been suffering from some sort of bleeding for that long. This condition would have disqualified her from marriage and from any religious life in general (see Lev. 15 and 20). But that didn’t stop her from seeking the One who could change her life:

A large crowd followed and pressed around him [Jesus]. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” . . . Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (vv. 24-30, 33-34)

Do not be mistaken: If this woman had touched someone else’s clothes thinking that would have done the job, she would have left the same way she came. Just thinking it’s true doesn’t make it so.

But connecting with the power of Jesus through complete trust in him . . . that’s faith. It’s like completing an electrical circuit—just don’t ask me to explain how that works! I only know that they’re alike in that there is a completion of a flow of power with an energy source.

And all it takes is one touch.