Dear Kids,
I know it doesn’t seem fair. The colorful plastic eggs and
the baskets wrapped in shiny cellophane do
look attractive. Those jellybeans certainly are delicious. And who wouldn’t
want a giant chocolate bunny?
Believe me, I understand the longing for pretty. For new.
For shiny and sugary.
It’s been that way from the start. Our eyes want what is
nice to look at. Our flesh craves something better, something more.
The hype sounds so good. You
want this. You need this. If you just get this—this ONE THING—you will be
satisfied.
We tell ourselves we deserve it.
And so we take. We clutch and cling and stuff ourselves
silly on all the things we want. We indulge.
But once fed, that beast is never satisfied. It will keep
whispering, just one more thing. And
in the end we are just tired from all
that trying to get stuff. We are left with empty plastic shells and sick
bellies and a question:
So what?
What was it all for?
The truth is, kids, you cannot hype your way to a better
story for your life. No one ever found freedom by filling themselves up with
stuff.
But there is something else.
All that hyped-up emptiness leads us to face the
indisputable, tragic fact:
We hurt.
We are wounded souls. The Easter Bunny can’t fix that.
And we can’t fix it either. We tried, remember? So we sink
down into that hurt and we live there. We blame. We blame ourselves, we blame
others, we blame circumstances. We blame God.
The trouble is, we can’t blame our way to a better story,
either.
Between the hype and the hurt is this thin path. It’s rugged
and rocky and often hard to see. But it is the way out.
This is the path of hope. And hope is messy and gray; it is
light and darkness mingled together. Hope is scary because it leads us into
open places where anything could happen.
This is where Jesus lives. It’s the path He came to make for
us, and it leads through hard places. It leads through death.
It doesn’t seem like walking through death would really be
the answer, does it? It’s easier just to live in the hurt place or keep chasing
the hype.
But every good story contains a death. Death is the only way
to new life. And every good character must die to himself if his story is to
find any meaning.
I know you don't want to believe me, kids, that
dying is the secret to living, and I can’t tell you that the hype and the hurt
won’t always be trying to pull you away. But Jesus came to show us how hope
pushes through the middle. And when you really have hope that meaning will come
through death, it sets you free.
That’s what Lent is really about. We pass through winter
into spring. All the seeds that died and were buried start to push through the
dark earth and breathe. And if you just filled up on eggs and bunnies, you
would miss this story, this amazing drama you are a part of.
His death gave you life so your story can have meaning. And
the little deaths you die each day, they can free you, if you will let them.
I’d fill you up with all the jellybeans in the world if it
meant your lives would be meaningful and whole. But try as I will to stop it, I
know the hurt is coming. And when it does, I don’t want you to sink down among
the empty shells of a hyped-out life. I want you to know the path of hope. And
I want to walk it with you.
* Thanks to Storyline speaker Mike Foster for the
inspiration for this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment