Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Blessed are they

The beatitudes are endlessly comforting.

Blessed are they...

The path of life is suffering, for one and all. For the secular, suffering is seemingly meaningless, often leading to despair. For the Christian, suffering is the promise of the cross.

For Christ tells us that we are blessed through it.

Particularly blessed.
Specifically blessed.
Magnificently blessed.

Christ has a magnificent story mapped out for each of us, and he watches to see how we choose to respond to and participate in it. Will we rise to the challenge? Will we fight and resist? Will we be beaten down by a reality we would prefer to reject?

Or will we turn toward it, bare our breast to the sword, and embrace the little deaths that are the price of everlasting life?

Blessed are they...

I find comfort in the certainty that while Christ readily accepted the cross that was His to carry, He most certainly did not enjoy it. And I am not called to enjoy mine. I am called to accept it, and I am called to see the stark beauty of it. I am called to hunger and thirst and to recognize that in that hunger I can find God.

Epic stories require battle and suffering and sorrow, rarely concluding with a simple "they lived happily ever after". The beauty, the glory, the magnificence is in the love and loss.

Our God is a God of the beatitudes.

Blessed are they who suffer.

I am endlessly comforted in knowing this.

1 comment:

Pranayama mama said...

It comforts me as well.

I also struggle with the fact that he died so I could be free; yet, I still live my life as if I'm in bondage.

If I fully trusted in God's sovereignty, I would have no worries as I'm in the palm of his hand.

However, I simply understand just a tiny sliver of the magnitude of his gift and continue to post little gains along the way -- which I'm grateful for.