Dear Theophilus:: December 2003
Fairy Tales? What Fairy Tales? Bah Humbug!
Reflections of a Modern-Day Scrooge.
by Steve Park
You take the good,
you take the bad,
you take them all
and there you have the facts of life.
Every now and then you come across someone that is just so happy, so optimistic, so full of joy; that you can't help but stop and think, "Man I wish I could share that joy." My wife is that kind of person. The kind of person that brightens up the room when they walk in. The kind of person that makes everyone around them feel happier. I'm not that person.
I like to complain. It's not blatant. Usually it comes in the form of "Oh it's so hot," or "Man, I'm so tired." No matter what the occasion, I always have an appropriate complaint. But aren't we all like that to a certain degree? Isn't the grass always greener on the other side? It's too hot in July, too cold in January. These jeans are too tight, those are too loose. I'm too fat, you're too skinny. This class is too hard, that class is too boring.
How many of us are happy with our jobs? With school? With our roommates? With our families? With our apartments? With our cars? With our majors? With our friends? If you are happy, then why do you complain so much? If you're not happy, why not? Why aren't you happy? We're so terribly negative sometimes. But sometimes it's really hard not to be. Take a look with me at today's headlines:
It's hard to be that smiley, cheerful person when stuff like this is going down in the world - and that's just today!
Did you know that roughly 1 billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and of that 1 billion, roughly 9 million die each year because they can't eat? That breaks down to about 24,000 people every day. 24,000 people die everyday because of hunger!
Did you know that 38.6 million adults and 3.2 million children were living with HIV at the end of 2002? In 2002, 3.1 million people died from HIV/AIDS - a higher global total than in any year since the beginning of the epidemic, despite antiretroviral therapy which reduced AIDS and AIDS deaths in the richer countries.
Hunger, AIDS, death, illness, tragedy, war. Combine these things with the hurts, pains and anxieties that we face everyday and it's hard to imagine that I will ever be that happy, go-lucky person. Is this just the way it has to be? Are these the facts of life that Tootee and Natalie had to learn to accept?
To a certain degree, yes. These things are real. People are dying. Injustice is prevalent throughout the world. And although I made light of them, the everyday concerns are real too. People struggle with these concerns everyday and it's not bad to be concerned with these things.
These things are real and we have to deal with them. But these things are not the truth. These things should not govern us to the degree that we let them. These things are important, but not that important. We have the only truth -Jesus loves us so much that He died for us. We have such an amazing joy that comes from this truth that to say that it overshadows our concerns could not do it justice. Our joy envelops our concerns.
I know this sounds terribly ideal. "Forget your worries and your concerns. Trust Jesus. Be joyful." It seems almost too easy to be true. The thing is, I'm usually not much of an idealist, but with this, I have to be. We try so many other things. Work harder. Make more money. Study harder. They don't work. They never will.
It's all about Jesus.
When I first met my wife, all she ever talked about was how the cross changed her life. I kept thinking, "Ok, ok. But don't you ever have anything else to say?" Now I realize how true that is. The cross has changed our lives. Does He solve every problem? Of course not. That is not what Jesus is about. It is not about solving the world's problem and making it a better place to live in. Those are the world's standards.
There are fairy tales, and we're a big part of them. Everyday we wake up and we experience them. Only we're not the hero, we're the ones being saved. We live in a hard world with hard problems. But despite those problems, we get to experience a greater, deeper joy.
It is often said that the light isn't as bright without the dark. Maybe that's true here. But I think this light is so bright, it doesn't matter what it's being compared to. It's the kind of light when once you experience it; you don't ever see the dark again. There are fairy tales; let's start living in them.
