AAUURRGGHH!!!!

“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.” (II Corinthians 4:8-9)

We all experience those times in life when it seems the whole world is closing in and nothing is going right. Sometimes it is just the onslaught of so many different things that can take our time and attention. The modern world of “conveniences” has made all of our lives far more busy and “inconvenient” that it was a generation ago. For me, it is the “to do list” that drives me up a wall. It is a lot better now, but I remember a while back going through my list and seeing well over 100 separate items on it. That means I could have been doing any one of a hundred things that day. Most of them were totally unrelated to each other. Sometimes you can have a bunch of things on your list, but they can be consolidated and knocked out in bunches. You could get in the car and spend an afternoon running errands and take care of a lot of it. But when I get loaded down with what seems like an impossible flood of stuff, it drives me to drink – Pepsi, of course. Sometimes the fetal position is a welcome diversion from life.

I get in these positions at times like everyone does, and quite often it is my own fault. Of course, I am the king of procrastination. I mean, why do today what you can put off till tomorrow? But at times, the wave of stuff comes at all of us from sources outside our own doing. As I said a few weeks ago in this blog, we go against the grain of this world as believers in Jesus Christ. When you swim upstream, you will get bombarded directly by the “course of this world” (Eph 2:2). Paul spoke about that in the verses I quoted above. We think that our world is somehow unique, and it is in some ways, but not really. Paul could identify with the overwhelming feeling of despair that bombards us, and he did not have a “to do list”. No one called him on his cell phone with yet another problem. He never got in his car to run a bunch of errands. He did not have a “Franklin Planner” to manage his day. Yet the onslaught of the world affected him as it does us. The earth spins on its axis at nearly 1,000 miles per hour, and as often as we cry, “Please stop the world so I can catch up!” we cannot. The world spun at the same rate in Paul’s day.

We take an annual trip to our adopted mission field of Belize. One of the benefits of that trip is to get our bearings in another culture and lifestyle. We take a few people from the church every year to minister to our friends in Belize, and to be ministered to themselves. It is refreshing to spend a few days in a culture where there is only one thing to do each day. As I describe the schedule for the team in our preparations, I mention our “to do list” for the trip, and I list that one thing for each day. The “newbies” who have never experienced the trip before look at me like I have three heads. But it is a great opportunity to recharge our lives and realize how many things we put on our “list” that really don’t matter that much.

Paul’s frustration in the above verses came from his ministry. He was bombarded by things that carried eternal significance. It got so bad at times that he said he and his men, “despaired even of life.” (II Cor 1:8). I think most of us will be ashamed when we get home to heaven to realize how much emotional energy we invested in things in this life that carried no eternal weight. Peter said if we were going to suffer, why not make it for well doing (I Pet 3:17). We will experience those times when life drives us to crawl under the blankets and pray for it to just go away. But let’s invest our lives in the things that will last forever – the word of God and the souls of men and women – so that one day, those frustrations will bear fruit that remains for eternity. As one of my favorite passages says, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (II Cor 4:17-18) Invest in eternal things. The dividends will pay off!