Living Life in Minor Chords (and other broken hallelujahs)

Some of your lives are perfect! You wake up every day with a cupcake on your pillow and roses by your bed. As you walk to your lovely job, you hum the bright and happy soundtrack of your life. You can’t be positive, but you have a sneaky suspicion that everyone can hear your awesome soundtrack as you walk past. It is an awesome life season and you pray daily that it will not end. 

For others, a different soundtrack plays in a minor chord as an ominous gray cloud looms over your head. You change the station, but the songs only get worse, eventually stopping on a NPR special highlighting a Serbian mother’s daily chores. You are stuck in life circumstances that you cannot change. Your baby has been diagnosed with a fatal disease. You have been diagnosed with cancer. Your wife can’t get pregnant and you can’t figure out why. You are the lot of lonely and desperate singles, the confused and angry betrothed, and the happily unhappy married couples. Life has hit you, but you are determined to fight back!

 First, you come up with a list of solutions. You will attack this circumstance face-to-face, and you will win! After weeks, months, or years of talking to every doctor, applying for every job, seeing counselors, singing special songs and holding community rain dances, nothing has changed. In fact, things have gotten worse. Now your car is broken, your dog is dead and you have roaches infesting your house.

You need a new plan of attack, so you decide to target the good soundtrack people. If you can just figure out how to steal their playlist, everything else will change. I bet they have access to a Michael Jackson hits station that will perfectly complement your outfit and new awesome life circumstances, or, get back, Mariah Carey #1’s! But, it’s a tale as old as time, and as old as Bill Murray in “What about Bob?” Your attempt to explain life’s injustices and advocate for more fair treatment is met with deaf ears and pompous solutions. You need to pray more, do more, try less, trust God, be content, and then you too can have an awesome life of major chords, cupcakes and roses. The more you try to justify yourself the crazier you become, leaving you bitter, angry and confused about what just happened!?! 

And that is how you arrived here, the place where everyone eventually arrives. With your most intimidating face and fists in the air, you are now ready to fight… God. Even atheists who swear to God they don’t believe in God, come to a point in their life where they are fighting against Him. It is actually a sign of maturity to realize that ultimately your beef is with God, who alone can do or change anything. Signs of your immaturity can be seen in your ridiculous tactical warfare attempts against God. Since you can’t see Him, can’t manipulate him and some days are scared to death of him, you have to be creative. I am angry with you God, so until you change things, I am going to eat. Yes, I am going to eat and eat and eat until I gain 4,000 pounds and cannot fit through the door you want me to walk. Since you won’t answer my prayers, I am going to stop talking with you. Yes, God, I’m giving you the silent treatment. Let’s see who breaks first. God, since you refuse to listen to my flawless reason, I have decided to run away. You may have created the world and everything in it, but you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man! (If you don’t know that awesome story, you should check it out) 

 

You fight. You fight until your tummy hurts, until your silence has become deafening, and until you are so lost it is impossible to find your way back. Defeated, angry and bitter you collapse to die. Too dramatic? Ok, you collapse to take a nap, whichever you prefer. Anyway, there in your defeat, God lets you rest. He doesn’t answer your questions. He doesn’t solve all of your life problems. He just picks you up and lets you enter his still calm rest and it feels nice.

Maybe this crazy season will end. God will give you a new awesome playlist, cupcakes on your pillows and roses by your bed. Maybe this difficult season will continue, but you will learn to quit fighting and daily rest and trust in God. Or maybe, like most of us, you will only rest for a little while but then find yourself back in the same pit of anxiety. You will try to fix your problem(s) on your own, become bitter and jealous of those more fortunate, and ultimately end up in a UFC battle with God. To save you the time and the obvious embarrassment, God is going to win, He will always win, but, in Him, you too will stand victorious. 

Don’t believe me? Read for yourself:

1 Kings 19

Hebrews 4

Ephesians 6:10-20

1 Peter 1:3-9