Life is just not really all that easy sometimes. Did you know that? Sometimes it's just harder than I thought it would be and I have to sit down and hold my head for a moment and reorient my self. It doesn't really always seem to add up like I thought it might. And while it's not unbearable, sometimes it's just tough.
I am a musical fan. I suppose my father being a musician, directing choirs and doing all the music part of the school musical productions started me down this path, I don't know. I know we owned every musical ever produced and I would listen to the albums over and over (some of you will have to go to a museum to see one) gazing at the pictures on the cover. It was just heavenly. I think the first musical I ever saw on television was West Side Story, which made me ball like a baby. My mother tried to soften the blow, 'this doesn't end well, Susan', but I still cried and cried. The second was Oklahoma. This was triple exposure because I owned the album, my dad performed the musical and I was in the musical in my own school. The line that always stuck in my head was Aunt Eller talking to the newlyweds saying "You got to take the good and the bad and say, 'Alright,then'". This sounded like a reasonable philosophy and I have tried to hold to it all my life.
Lately it seems like I have been saying 'Alright then' and awful lot. I am not really complaining. My life is good, my kids are good, my call crisis is resolving and my health is great. It's just that at times, I grow weary of the stress, the squabbling, the meeting the needs and dealing with the attitudes that are the reality of being a human being, living in world filled with others. While there has definitely been provision made for me and for mine, sometimes the provision is not as secure as I would like and I cannot see how I get from A to B. Especially when I am tired and my feelings are dangling out there for the breeze to toss back and forth, I feel like life is very hard indeed.
How can we stay joyful when we feel joyless? I know it's not waiting for the feeling to come back, feelings being unreliable and so conditional to what's happening in the present. I don't think it's buying stuff or eating more, both of which I have a tendency to enjoy and think helpful to my mood swings. I think it is really not at all based in external input whatsoever. I believe joy comes from the deeply held inner conviction that God loves me. God is all he said he was, all knowing, all seeing and Lord over all time and all space. In all that power and authority, he chooses to love me, take care of me and cover me with his glory. Regardless of my circumstances, my success or my popularity, my value is firmly established by the value my Father places on me, that while I was yet a sinner he sent his only son to die for me. Joy comes from knowing that we know that we know that we are the apple of our Eternal Fathers eye, not because we are so good but because we belong to him.
Life is hard. Sometimes very hard indeed. Sometimes so hard that it's hard to breathe, to smile, to be joy filled. We can always chose to be miserable, that's an easy decision. Let's choose instead to say, even in our misery, we will remember to whom we belong. He has completed our joy and when we love him back, somehow we complete his.
Keep your heads up, look at the good things and the bad things and say 'Alright then', and remember 'who loves you, baby'. My Father will take care of it, He loves that job!
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