What I learned this last year…
No, wait, what I learned when I was 70…Ugh, I meant what I learned in school last year…
…What I really mean is ‘what I learned, over my year at school, when I was 70.
I didn’t learn it just because I was 70.
It didn’t take all year to learn it, rather in pieces at a final coalescing moment. And, surprise- it wasn’t even actually taught.
I learned it because I was 70 and no longer believed I had to understand everything at first glance. I learned it because I was in school with others and the atmosphere itself posed questions, beyond us all, really. I learned it because school required me to embrace other lines of thought.
What I did learn- or, in a limited way came to understand- is that the entire universe is adversarial. It’s easy enough to see in our everyday world but what’s sometimes forgotten is that evidently, through Heaven’s rebellion, God faced the same crisis. This is a universal truth with universal consequences. There’s a war being waged.
I learned that adversity was not an accident or a mistake, or something to be glibly attributed to my own, other’s or even God’s inadequacies. I learned adversity was essential part of growth required to become my best self.
In a very real way, and over a lifetime, you are, in part, the sum of all the adversity you’ve encountered and overcome. I do not just say encountered, for we all make choices about what we face and how intimately we engage. We don’t always press through and overcome. Those adversities end up as failed opportunities, some to be repeated, other’s lessons seemingly lost forever. They too shape our identity.
The adversity we face and bring captive to the obedience of Christ though, those things gain us a victory and a faith that will follow us on into eternity. And, if we believe the scriptures, with reward.
The last piece of my thought has to do with suffering and pain. While it’s intuitive to avoid pain and suffering, it’s not a solid or a complete theology to miss it’s importance in our wisdom’s growth and maturity. Pain too is an adversity to be finally faced and brought into the knowledge of Christ.
After all, Jesus bore our pains and our sorrows and we too are instructed to bear, in love, with those around us. It would seem that until we’ve entered into the fellowship of his sufferings, that we’re not entirely qualified to share in his resurrection life, here on this earth.
In short, adversity establishes and eventually brings out the best in us. The pain and sorrow we suffer as we face life gives us an ever increasing capacity for faith as it, forcefully at times, reshapes our inner man after the image of Christ.