Life is So Daily

I have often used the expression “life is so daily” but with tongue in cheek and being a little sarcastic.  However, more and more, I am realizing that this is exactly true!  The little everyday niggling things in life are what bog me down, and there seems to be no shortage.  Can you relate to how you feel when you open the washing machine and discover you missed seeing a paper tissue in a pant’s pocket that is now stuck in tiny bits all over everything you just washed?  How about planting new spring flowers and finding that a rabbit has eaten them down to the stems the first night?  Or, just when your garden Hosta plants are most beautiful, a deer has discovered how very delicious they taste?  I seem to frequently want a bowl of cereal only when the milk jug is nearly empty!  Lately, I wake up nearly every morning with a sick migraine headache. This happens on Sundays when I want to go to church, or when I have planned a lunch date with family or friends as well.  These are little, relatively no consequence, varieties of daily things that happen to us all.

Then there are some events that involve more angst.  Things like bending or twisting incorrectly and pinching a nerve that causes constant and painful discomfort at every move; feeling suddenly faint and not remembering a serious fall that causes bruising and bleeding; needing to go to the dentist for a costly root canal or crown procedure.  Finding out you need to take care of a potentially serious medical condition is another.  Add an expensive ordeal like waking up and realizing your well pump has stopped working and you also need a new sump pump.  Have you been told that you need to change the transmission fluid in your car, or that you really do need a new serpentine belt?  How about when your precious little “furbaby” slips a disc and needs surgery to restore mobility in her paralyzed back legs requiring “big bucks”?  Still, we mostly “do what we have to do”!

But when those agonizing, joy-stealing, days come into our lives, we want to despair.  Things like finding out you are infertile; experiencing a miscarriage for a much desired child or giving birth to a still-born baby.  There can be the painful, knowledge that your teenage child is addicted to drugs, and not anxious to receive “help”; or estrangement from grown children.  Things like horrific accidents that cause life-changing paralysis or even loss of life.  Events like divorce, death of a spouse or child, unthinkable murder within a family, all causing us to fall to our knees and ask “why”?  These are the things we often are required to suffer and which show our true character, and hopefully our faith in the God of the universe which sees and knows all things. 

The Bible tells us in James 1:2, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you have trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.  Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything”.  But to count it ‘joy” Lord? Really, Lord? What are You asking? 

I believe God is asking us to trust Him in all things.  Psalm 20:7, “[I] trust in the name of the Lord, my God”.  Isaiah 30:18, “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; He rises to show you compassion.  For the Lord is a God of justice.  Blessed are those who wait for Him”.  Proverbs 3:5, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”.  Isaiah 30:15, “In repentance and rest is your salvation; In quietness and trust is your strength”.  Psalm 56:4, “In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I will not be afraid”.

Yes, we can all agree that life is so very daily!   Luke 9:23, “Then (Jesus) said to them all: If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross DAILY and follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Me will save it”.  Will we choose: faith or worry; trust or terror; joy or unhappiness?  Someone once said, “When a Christian with a deep and knowing faith believes, the glass is never half empty, for with God the glass is full to the brim and overflowing.” My dear friend has a great expression, “One day closer!” (to Heaven)  I love it!

Dear Lord, You, above all others, know that this life is difficult.  You have experienced all the same things that discourage, hurt, and tempt us everyday.  You have overcome all things so that we may also overcome.  Give us strength and courage to place our trust and our very lives into Your keeping.  Nothing, no situation we ever face, is beyond Your power and love, and we stand firm in knowing that, with You, all is well today. In the name of Jesus, Amen