How to Be

As I previously shared on this blog a few months ago, on August 28, my husband had a stroke, quite out of the blue.

A close friend, who has been walking through the trial of lung cancer with his girlfriend, visited my husband and me in the hospital. As we three sat and reflected on how quickly our health can change, and thus, life itself can change, and on how we try to navigate it the best we can, our friend sat back and pretty much summed it up with, 

“You don’t know how to be.” 

And he’s right: as the person who must care for and support my husband, and still take care of myself, I didn’t know how to be in this new curve ball life just threw at me. 

And my husband didn’t know how to be as he experienced emotions and limitations he has never before experienced.

The three of us agreed that we learn “how to be” as we go, and even then, the circumstances can change, and so the learning is a constant. 

This morning it occurred to me, as I ponder Christmas and Jesus’ coming to earth, that one of the blessings of Jesus’ coming is that He teaches us “how to be;” not just in crisis, but every day, all the time, in all circumstances. 

And the beauty of a crisis is that, if we haven’t learned it from Him already, we get to learn how to be when the rug is pulled out from underneath us. 

Now some might say they prefer to be ignorant in this. But most would agree that, at minimum, “people learn from their mistakes.” And that, generally, is perceived as a good thing.

The question is, what  do we learn? And if not from Christ, then from who, or what? 

The secular humanist mantra of picking one’s self up by one's boot straps: does that also inform on how to be before one is able to pick themselves up by their boot straps? And what if a person cannot? What if a person cannot pick themselves up?

For many years, I could “learn from my mistakes” by merely being young enough to recover from them! I wouldn’t say I “learned” all that much from my mistakes, which is why I often made the same mistake over and over again. Youth is quite forgiving in and of itself.

And then, as life got on, the mistakes finally caught up with me. And I began to slowly realize that I, in fact, did not know how to be, or how to pull myself up. And that is the best place to be because that has the potential to be the end of the self-perpetuated dead-end road.

If we harken to God’s call, God--who is the One who stands waiting for us at the end of that dead-end road--can walk us into a completely new direction. 

Some people will say that they got over all kinds of things without God. Or that they know people who got over all kinds of things without God. And I believe this is true. 

But again, this begs the question: how did they get over these things? In a functional, life-transforming way, or in a dysfunctional, life-staying-pretty-much the same or even becoming worse, way?

There are all sorts of worldly ways to “recover” from things (the most common being to delude ourselves and others that recovery has actually taken place!). 

And then there are God’s ways. 

And the people I know who were honestly transparent about their situation without losing hope, and who were transformed permanently by it, and who grew in grace after having experienced it, did it on the foundation of Christ and their God-given faith in Him. 

Sure, there are folks who put on a strong face and a stiff upper lip, a “can-do,” “positive” attitude, believing that the best example and help to themselves and the world is to be a pillar of feel-good affirmations. 

Or, there are those who shuffle through by being overtly depressed, down, and morose, relying heavily on the sympathies of others, rejecting all and any encouragement and hope.

And then there is the way Jesus’ provides for us, on a daily basis, within the normal ups and downs of life, and specifically, in a crisis: those times that throw us for a loop and we discover that, in this situation, we don’t really know how to be. So we don’t rely on and trust in our self, or worldly logic and advice, or cultural and psychological “shoulds."

Jesus says, 

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

The thief comes to steal our health, to kill and destroy our joy, and to basically make life miserable in any way that he can. 

Jesus comes that we may have life, not only in spite of the thief, but in answer to and victory over the thief. 

I believe it is John MacArthur who said that if a person lives long enough, they will experience suffering. It is a given. 

Jesus, in His Word of Life and Spirit, informs as to how to be when suffering shows up on our doorstep, as it has, and it does, and it surely will. 

That is why He came. To be in us what we cannot know to be without Him, so that we may have life—even in sickness, even in tragedy, even in despair, even in turmoil, even in loneliness, even in death. 

He came that we—whether alive with Him or with Him in death—have life, and have “it to the full.”

Copyright Barb Harwood