How to Handle a Sucky Year
The first pastor that I considered my pastor, was someone who had gone through tremendous hardship in life. His first wife and three little boys died in a car accident, in the car he was driving. He was the sole survivor, and his physical recovery took a year.So in my early Christian life, when I was going through a very hard time, and he sat down to talk to me about how to handle adversity, I was willing to listen. He had been through it, but was also one of the most joy filled people I had ever met.He said, “Scott, you have a lot to be thankful for. Tell me what’s good in your life. Tell me about your blessings.” At the time, I was homeless, living in a motel with my sister, and peeling potatoes at a grocery store deli, just to pay the motel bill and buy enough food to survive. And he wanted me to tell him about the blessings in my life? That seemed cruel.I started complaining about my situation. He didn’t stop me. After I finished, he asked, “But what do you have to be thankful for?” I looked at him with a blank stare.“You have some pretty bad things going on in your life right now. I get it. I’ve been there. But if you let those things take over your thinking, it won’t make them go away or get better. It’ll just make you miserable and take you away from God.”He went on, “1 Thessalonians 5:18 says, ‘Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.’” He said, “Paul didn’t say ‘Give thanks for all circumstances.’ You don’t have to be thankful for what you are going through. But Paul did say, ‘Give thanks in all circumstances.’ In other words, you can focus on and be thankful for all of your blessings, even when other things in your life are hard.”I’ve never forgotten those words or the man, Pastor Mark Shore, who lived them. And it has forever altered my approach to difficult times.
We just want this year to be over.
We keep talking about how we just want 2020 to be over, that it is a sucky year. “Let’s just move on into 2021!” But maybe the biggest blessing in 2020 is this very lesson. The best way to handle a year like this, COVID, quarantine, job losses, business failures, church closings, family disputes, political chaos, racial tension, and violence in the streets, is not by ignoring these things. No, we do need to do what we can to find solutions. But the best way to handle these things in our spirits, our thinking, and our emotions, is to do exactly what Paul said to do, “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
Maybe we need a little more time in this year of adversity, to remember the goodness of God in the middle of difficulty.
So this is Thanksgiving weekend. And now we are rushing into Christmas because we just want this year over. But maybe we do need another month of 2020. I think we could all use the practice. We need a little more time in this year of adversity, to remember the goodness of God in the middle of difficulty. And that produces an unconditional joy that the world around us desperately needs to see.