The left footprint on display in the fresh-turned soil bore no resemblance to its counterpart. My right foot featured a really high arch while the left one lacked an arch at all. This one’s imprint carried the appearance of a flat board.
Thus, my bare feet had left a trail of odd alternating marks as I leapt to keep pace with my daddy’s longer strides across the plowed furrows.
Yes, the hardship of poliomyelitis from a prior time had left permanent marks. Yet, here I was curiously limping. . . and frolicking.
We don’t find people who are prone to relish suffering. I would certainly not be counted among them. Words like hardship or adversity or pain stir in many of us a cringe of resistance and angst.
Still, visiting the Bible’s pages we routinely find triumph mingled with trial. Pleasure and pain show up as near neighbors. Happiness keeping company with hardship.
We muse over these strangely-matched companions. Especially so in reflective seasons like Holy Week, the period of Jesus’ (and history’s) darkest hours leading to his awful crucifixion.
How perplexing seems the phrase of the New Testament writer, “looking to Jesus who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross*
Enduring flogging and a torturous public execution with its attending shame, Christ’s suffering comes to us as ‘hardship’ utterly redefined.
So, we revisit our prayer – “accepting hardship as a pathway to peace”.
The apprentice of Jesus comes to actually affirm the beauty of suffering when endured in a grace lavishly supplied. Holding the master’s image in view the disciple settles into an element of peace words fail to capture. The difference is found through the example and presence of the resurrected, sacrificial coach.
Christ’s disciples make up that unusual sampling of humans who reconcile the paradox – hardship, an indispensable part of the good life.
He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace*
©2023 Jerry Lout *Hebrews 12:2 *Isaiah 53:5
WOW – just wow! You have successfully pinpointed the issue of why we suffer and how to endure it. Thank you!
Grateful, RJ, for such commendation.
J B Phillips calls our trials, ‘our friends’. Are we ‘persecuted’ to keep the O T law (Gal 4:29)? Doesn’t the world push and desire for us to try to keep the law (OT law)? They persecuted Jesus because in their eyes He did not keep the law? Your description of the Holy Spirit, ‘sacrificial coach’, rally intriguing. Thanks. ken
Thank you, Ken