Living life

I often journey to Wendy's to grab some food. I can't count the number of times in Blacksburg I walked or drove over to the building on the corner of Price's Fork and North Main. Since school, though, I still make my way over for a sandwich and fries. But I digress.

In most Wendy's locations, a little box sits near the cash register for the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. I haven't looked into it, but I'm sure its an incredible organization that needs every donation available to continue its work. You've probably seen other boxes with slots for spare change and bills as donations for different causes in other places. As I dropped my change into the slot, I started thinking about what it meant. I was dropping a few cents, the leftovers from what I paid for my meal, to help this organization. What I realized is that so often we give our spare change, our leftovers, to different causes in our lives. But how often do we give our all? How often do we go without a meal, for example, and give that money so others can eat? I don't think I have.

What I'm getting at is how in many areas of our lives we are content to give just a little, just what we have left after our needs are met. I've seen it in my own life. Seems like I do that with God sometimes. I settle for the bare minimum, whatever that may be in my own eyes, instead of working towards giving it everything I've got. Why do we do this? Is it laziness? Fear? What holds us back from living like we mean it?

I was hit with this earlier today as I stood in Wendy's waiting for my Frosty. I should live life with everything I've got. Yes, it is harder and scarier and less convenient. But everything I've learned the past few years has shown me that living life to its fullest, whatever that may mean, is definitely worth it. What do you think?

The first step is figuring out how.
The second is getting up the courage to move.

I pray we'll get up and move.

Ashley Nicole Cassell

Last Friday, 12/16/11, was the one-year anniversary of a dear friend's passing out of this life. She had incredible faith and perseverance in the midst of pain and suffering. Although her body was frail, her heart and spirit were vibrant and full of energy. She had numerous health problems since birth, many caused by a very weak immune system. All the time I knew her she was confined in a wheelchair. She had a cane and could walk and stand for short periods of time. Her health fluctuated all the time and she was in the hospital many times.

But this post isn't about the weakness of my friend's body. This post is about her showing us that life is worth living - even when nothing makes sense, our world falls around us, and pain seems a constant part of life.

Ashley loved to write and receive letters, even in this digital age. She said there was just something special about writing a letter and getting a letter someone wrote. I had the privilege to trade letters with her for three or four years before she died. Even when she couldn't write due to medication issues, she would type them and print them out to send to me and others. What struck me most, aside from her patient endurance, was her sense of hope.

I know few people who have such extreme hope. Through her trials and pain and setbacks, she held onto the joy and hopefulness that caused her to be such a light to all of us. It was incredible. She was so optimistic about the future, whether the possibility that she could walk with RGO's and enough practice, or my upcoming graduation and job hunt. Although her future was cut short by a bout of pneumonia she couldn't overcome, her optimism concerning life itself always amazed me. And continues to. When I get weighed down by the troubles in my life, I remember my friend Ashley. One of the quotes from her letters that comes to mind is from Viktor Frankl, a man who endured Nazi concentration camps and concluded that even in the worst situations, life is still potentially meaningful; so even suffering can have meaning. "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."

I wish you could have known her. I don't know where you stand on the whole "afterlife" thing, but I believe my friend is finally at peace, free from the physical and emotional pain that showed up each day for her. And I can't wait to take a walk with her one day. One of her last statuses was an anonymous quotation, "Peace is not the absence of affliction, but the presence of God."

the human condition

Tonight I am struck with how broken our world is. Yesterday a troubled young man shot and killed a policeman who was performing a routine traffic stop. This happened at a place which has had its share of violence and pain over the past five years. Although not directly affected by those events, my life has been shaped by them over the past four years. Countless friends I've made were hurt by that day, and I see it resurfacing with the events of this Thursday. Death and fear brought at the end of a gun. It just reminds me how broken and shattered this world has become.

Earlier today I was sitting in a waiting room at the hospital down in Winston-Salem. I have to travel there each year for them to look at my eyes (when I was a baby they did some major surgeries on my left eye). I was sitting in the waiting room for them to call me in and take some pictures. While there I noticed the rest of the chairs were filled with people who looked tired and shaken. A woman beside me was talking to another older woman sitting with her husband. He was called into the room and seemed disoriented. His wife began telling us that the past three years were harder than anything we could imagine. Her husband's only brother and only son had been diagnosed with different cancers within months of each other and had passed away recently. His daughter-in-law was going through medical difficulties as well. He himself had a debilitating medical condition and was now losing his slowly losing his sight. You could tell she was at the end of her rope and was tired of this life.

As I sat there listening to her story, the woman beside me could only place a hand on her and said she would pray for her. She then began to say that to compare her problems would be insensitive, but that she was dealing with two sons who had disabilities. Her five-year-old had a mental condition and was not expected to live more than a year from now. She herself was the victim of a home invasion last month and was beaten unconscious. She said that's why she was at the hospital today; to see if her sight would be permanently damaged.

Both women sat in silence and I pleaded with God for something to say, some words of comfort to pour into their lives. But the magnitude of their suffering overwhelmed me. As I listened, I wondered how they could get up each morning and face the day. The woman beside me said "I keep asking God why He keeps putting me through this. He knows I don't have a big 'S' on my chest. There's no cape on my back. I'm not Superman." She asked me about my story this year, and I mentioned how I had recently graduated from Tech. Naturally the events of yesterday came up, and we discussed them briefly. We agreed that this world in which we live is very difficult. More difficult than I had ever realized sometimes. The woman beside me talked about how people we see every day can be going through such fierce battles in their lives and we never know it. The pain and exhaustion in both women's eyes were evident. I thought we had reached a point where mere words weren't enough.

Then I remembered a quote from Mother Teresa that I was able to paraphrase for them. "I know God won't give me anything I can't handle, but I just wish He didn't trust me so much."

The feelings behind that statement won't make the pain go away. They won't make life turn rosy and perfect for these women and their families. But the moment of laughter brought a smile to their faces. Maybe it was a reminder that the darkness we walk through isn't complete.

Shortly afterward I was called into the room and once the pictures were taken I was back in the hallway by the waiting room. The two women I had been talking with were gone, and the room was filled with other families. I never got their names, and I doubt I'll ever see them again, but I'm sure their stories will stick with me. We don't have the answers for why life is so hard, or why terrible things happen to good people, but we can have hope. You can call it coincidence, but I feel there was a reason I was in that waiting room this morning. The doctor I was seeing decided to have them take pictures of my eyes, something they hadn't done since 2004. I was next to a woman who was open and honest about discussing her life with total strangers, which reminded me how we are built for community. We can't make it through the hardships of this world without community, whether it be close friends or complete strangers.

So I sit here and try to put all this together.

We live in a shattered world.
But we have a hope that transcends the brokenness.

What we need

"Thank You for being the God You are, the God we need, not the God we want You to be."

The above words popped into my head a couple days ago. Sometimes when we take things into our own hands, thinking that our way is best, it doesn't end too well. You can apply that to many aspects of life, spiritual or otherwise. But as I sit here it occurs to me that so often we want God to do something our way, to give us what we think is best, to show up and act the way we feel he should, and to approve our choices and decisions while disregarding the fact that he may have another idea. I stand in awe that God does not bend to our every whim but is steadfast and intelligent enough to know what is truly best for us. Although that can be pretty hard to see sometimes. What is best for us, what we truly need, usually can seem like terrible medicine. And maybe it takes a while to see the effects.

Some would say that it is obvious that a Being as great and other-worldly as God would be set apart from us and capable of things far beyond our ability to grasp and comprehend. And yet I find over and over again that this God who could form the heavens actually takes an interest in our lives here on this bit of rock floating through space. He concerns himself with our endeavors and cares about our problems. Jesus spoke about telling God the things that you need, the problems you face, the worries that consume you, and he would handle them. Maybe not how we would have thought, maybe not how we would have at all; but the important part is that God supplies our needs.

“And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus. To our God and Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen.” – Philippians 4:19-20

So many times we want God to do something, to act a certain way, to intervene at a certain point. And then we get discouraged when he doesn't. We get frustrated when it seems like things are crashing down around us. Or when the timing isn't right. Or when things happen that we thought he could prevent or fix. May we take comfort and, more importantly, hope, in the promise that he may not be predictable, but he will be there for us and he will act according to his timing and his purpose.