Comfortable and Fair

It's unpleasant (this whole mess).

Human beings prefer lives that are comfortable. Physically comfortable. Emotionally comfortable.

When we, aw...

OK...

Me.

When my comfort is disturbed, when I have to change, have to adapt to circumstances I do not like, I resist.

My first resistance is to ignore it. Deny it. Disbelieve.

That was my first reaction when Willy died. It was my first reaction when I suspected my wife unfaithful.

When Willy died I didn't want to believe I was no longer a father. When Brenda betrayed me I did not want to believe that the future I envisioned was not to be.

This seems natural. It makes sense we do not want to be uncomfortable, for our lives to hurt.

But, on further reflection, I think it is a little odd. Why should we expect it be something it isn’t?

I don't know much about childbirth, but it seems to me that the transition from the safety of the womb to this world must be, at least, uncomfortable, at most, terribly frightening.

We come into this world uncomfortable.

And it continues. We discover what it is like to be hungry. No wonder babies cry so much! Suddenly they need to be fed. And they grow tired, unused to the noise and input that keeps them awake longer than they would like.

The first few days, first few weeks, of our lives are filled with learning this world is an uncomfortable place.

Yet, here I am, 52 years old, and I am surprised when I get hurt.

When I was a toddler I fell down. I skinned my knees learning to walk, probably in just in learning to crawl. Falling from swings, and bicycles. Hitting my thumb with a hammer, almost every lesson I learned, almost everything I know, what "hot" means, what "sharp" means, what cold, and itchy and rough and sad and angry and nearly everything I have experienced, told me the world is uncomfortable.

And it surprises me.

Why is that?

Why should I be surprised my marriage has failed? She is human. She has been fashioned like all the rest of us, to think about her comforts, pleasures, wants, needs. How could I expect she put me before herself?

Yet I did.

It is odd humans expect the world to be comfortable.

We also expect it to be fair. Or at least we feel it ought to be.

Why? There is little evidence it should be.

Tyrants have ruled and hurt and killed throughout history, throughout prehistory.

Disease has swept through families and villages and nations throughout time.

Even the earth beneath us has risen up and hurt us without warning. Volcanoes have spouted death, the oceans have risen and washed away lives.

Yet, we have this sense that things should be fair. They simply aren't. The world is not made that way.

So why do we think life should be comfortable and fair?

I think it is because, deep in our hearts... or rather, deep in our souls, we know that on the grand scale of things, happiness, comfort, fairness, is built into who we are, is what our maker wants for us. Deep within us we have the sense of rightness for us, a sense that joy is the fabric from which the universe is made.

Because, deep within us, we sense eternity. We carry the proof of a loving God within our natural expectations that life should be comfortable and fair.

There is a lack of “proof” God exists... no signature of the artist on the canvass, at least not the sort everyone can see.

And... there is an abundance of “proof” God exists.

We believe life should be comfortable, fair, when all the evidence is to the contrary.

And more... Why do we sense so many things which provide no advantage for our survival? If evolution were the only force behind what we are, why do we have the sense of beauty? Why do we feel joy? Why do we care about strangers? The environment? How is it we can offers ourselves? Self sacrifice. Service to others.

Last week I was in the Prayer room at church. I was praying out loud, singing, writing prayers on the walls. And I was hurting. I was grieving.

But there is a part of my mind which seems to always monitor how I am thinking, evaluating myself. And that part of me, looking down on the emotional, hurting part of me, saw something beneath the pain.

I saw joy.

I saw that below, or behind, beneath, what I feel now, there is an underlying truth of beauty and joy and wonder.

If all I am is my mind, the emotions it conjures, the tempests of my heart, why would I sense peace and joy and love deep underneath? Why would I be tossed about in a stormy sea, and clinging to the broken mast, and know that in the depths of the ocean is a calm, wondrous, joyous love?

Because...

I am His.

I am nothing. a bit of protoplasm on a spinning ball of dirt on the edge of a galaxy of billions of stars of a galaxy swimming among hundreds of billions of galaxies, in a single brief moment of the time line of this universe... I am a whiff of smoke, I am a cloud of molecules held together in the form of a man for a brief span of a few score years...

And I know that the being which created the whole thing, who holds the universe together as a single thing, a made thing, from creation to the end of time, as easily as I might hold a hat... I know that being who is impossible for me to imagine, has seen me, knows me, cares what happens to me, loves me.

That is why I believe in comfort, fairness, joy.

Because He gave me a soul that senses... eternity.