Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
What is your first reaction to hurt? Shriveling up in a corner. Obviously. Is that what you should do? Probably not.
Everything our lives are based upon is either made of beauty or pain. God created you inside of your mothers womb and it was beautiful. You were born and your mother had to go through the pain of labor but something beautiful came out of it. Something incredible. YOU. Adam was created in the Garden. Beauty. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Pain and suckyness. Jesus died to take away that hurt. Beauty from pain. What am I getting at? I don't even know.
What if we had no pain? What if hurt was gone. There will be a day that we all enter past the gates of heaven and it disappears. But we're obviously stuck on a world with a lot of pain.
Kids are aborted. Children are starving orphans. Parents get divorced. And through the thick of it there is this weird, crazy guy named Jesus standing there. I know a LOT of people that wish they couldn't feel any pain. Or feel any hurt or rejection. I for one wish a lot of things didn't hurt.
But what if we found out how to make our hearts no hurt anymore? Obviously that's impossible without a crap load of help from the Jesus dude. But the point is this.
If it weren't for hurt and pain and suffering. We would be nowhere. We would be ghosts walking across oceans and bare hills. We would be the Tin Man waling back and forth looking for a heart.
The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz originated when Nick Chopper (aka the tin man before becoming the tin man) had a spell cast on his axe by the evil Witch of The West. And in using the axe he accidentally kept chopping off his limbs. He replace them with prosthetic "tin" limbs. Eventually. Everything in his body was replaced with tin. And his heart was left out.
We go through life chopping down our trees then something comes along and makes it to were we start chopping off our own limbs. And we're forced to replace them with quick and easy "tin" - like answers. But in the equation we leave out the thing God put in us to keep us real and sane. Our hearts.
I say this to make you realize that if we become neutral and numb, then everything around us doesn't matter. Everything you love and have loved becomes ash. It really does. Hell, I can't tell you what to do. But you go around saying nothing matters and that you don't care and then you tell me that you're happy. You won't be.
The quote at the top of this page is from Lord of the Rings. Gandalf and Frodo are sitting there chillaxen and Frodo says he wished none of these bad things have happened. And Gandalf is like "dude. It did happen. We have to deal with it. But we also have to decide what we're going to do with what opportunities we have." Can I get an amen? We can wish all we want that things never happened. But we more so need to look at what's on our plate and decided if we're going to throw it away or eat it. Got that? Beauty evolves from pain. It takes time. It always does. But we have to decide if we're going to sit there saying "i don't care. i'm numb. i don't want to feel anything." Or look at this ever present beauty and love that surrounds us in the arms Christ. It's real. It's so real.
Lou's Song ~ Jason Upton. Look it up. Kay? Kay.
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