This morning in our final chapel we will have the opportunity to pray for our students as they head out into this next phase of the journey. I am tempted to give them just the good news, the rousing call to action and the promise of blessings. But we all know that the next phase, the phase that the rest of us are in, is not all just good news and blessings. This next phase for them and this next phase for us will continue to be a mixture of all of life.
I have always loved how honest the scriptures are about this mix of life. They don’t just say, you will be blessed if you follow Jesus. They don’t just promise goodness that is pressed down and shaken together, running over, and poured into our lap. They don’t ever say that this life we are called to live is going to be easy.
It is so important that we not only hear but live honestly with the words of the apostle Paul found in 2 Timothy 3:10-12. There was faith and love but also persecution and suffering. He goes on to say, “Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted…everyone must endure hardship.” Paul reminds us that difficulties are normative for the faithful follower of Jesus. Christians are not shielded from persecution and hardship. “And yet” Paul continues “the Lord rescued me from all of them” Paul is honest about the hardship it had to be endured but he is also clear that God has never left him.
A decade ago while I was in seminary, I met an undergraduate named Ingrid. She was the one who taught me about the discipline that is required to live in this place where we are honest about both the hardship and the blessing. She told me that to live in this place I needed to get rid of the word “but” in my life with God and that I need to replace it with the world “and”.
She said, “So often in our life with God we use the word but when we talk about God. ‘God is good, but I can’t find a job,’ or ‘God I’m an hurt, but you are faithful.” Ingrid continued, “But we shouldn’t use the word but we should use the word and because when we use the world but it modifies the first half of the statement in a wrong way. ‘God is good, but I can’t find a job’ communicates that my lack of a job modifies the goodness of God. ‘God I am hurt but you are faithful,’ ends up meaning God’s faithfulness minimizes my pain and that is not always true either. God is good and everything doesn’t work. Everything doesn’t work out and God remains good.”
Ingrid taught me how to use the word and, and it has changed the way I walk through this life with God. It allows me to live in the tension of being in relationship with a good God in view of circumstances that sometimes work out, but are often less than what I had dreamed. There are hardships and God does rescue. God does rescue and hardships remain. The good and the bad actually live alongside one another pretty well.
This year has been a year of and’s. We have experienced life and death, hope and disappointment, good students and one’s that make us crazy, loss and gain, fruit and the waiting for fruit. My prayer for us is that as we look back on it his year we will find that the good and the hard lived well together and I pray that you will find evidence that God presence was found in both.
