“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.” Isaiah 55:8
“Therefore we do not lose heart, but though we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory will be revealed in us.” Romans 8:18
I have never liked the idea that our troubles can automatically be compared to the troubles of Biblical characters who were facing death, imprisonment and torture. I don’t like the way we middle class western Christians constantly compare our plight with those who suffer in ways that we only touch from time to time. In short, it is not that we don’t suffer, we all suffer, but to exaggerate our plight and compare it to those around the world who struggle with the ever present reality of disease, oppression and despair only serves to mask our own situation and diminish what others face.
I also don’t want to create a narrative for people that challenges we face are outside our control, that we are martyrs or that the devil or evil forces are behind every person who gives us a hard time. All of us have some form of agency and we need to exercise it rather than run to a place of righteous martyrdom. Finally, all of us, not least of which myself, need to know we learnt things about ourselves in these matters. No challenge I have ever faced did not in some small way reveal a flaw in the way I live my life, in the way I think about the world and my place in it. Even in challenges where it was clear to me my part in the “mess” was not the largest there was enough of my fingerprints on the challenge to understand I had a lot to learn.
Still these four short verses of scripture do remind us there is a larger perspective in all of this, that despite the now there is a then, that in the midst of the gnawing present there will be a future. One of the greatest sources of hope for me is to remember times in my life when I woke up and did not want to go to work, did not want to engage the world that day but did so and day by day there were better days ahead. These better days did not necessarily happen the next day or the next or the next but they did come to be. For whatever reason all of my bad days seem to come in the autumn, the fall, and the winter is the season when the challenges settle in, when the new reality makes itself known.
I experience spring time not as new and exciting time but as the adjustment to the new normal. It is the time when spring is just about to become summer when I really start to appreciate and enjoy what life is and find the kind of joy I have been yearning for. Summer is icing on the cake. In short what I am saying is that while time does not heal all or solve all problems the cycle of the seasons so have a way of bringing us along to new days of understanding, acceptance and change, not to mention deep joy. Patience is my least developed virtue, actually I have next to none. So this lesson of seasonal cycles has come slow to me.
Therefore we do not lose heart, but though we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.