SANITIZED LIFE

Sometimes, tragedy strikes.  This past weekend, a news anchor was killed here and left behind his wife and almost one year old daughter.  Early last month, some friends of ours were a part of a tragedy that killed two high school students.  It seems so senseless that these lives would be taken in accidents.  It rocks the communities that it impacts, and it leaves questions about our good God and why these bad things happen.  These are just two recent examples.

And I'm starting to wonder why I am ever shocked.

This world is a hard place to live.  Fact.  It is not the home that God has for us, and it is not what he intended.  People die young.  Accidents happen.  There are cycles of abuse.  Cancer claims someone else.  Poverty is ever present.

I've realized that often my life is quite sanitized in my first-world, upper-middle class community.  There is medicine to make things feel better.  I shop in an up-scale grocery store with too many options.  Clean water comes from my faucets on demand.  My food is slaughtered for me somewhere far away from me.  Death is not lurking around the corner, at least, it doesn't seem that way.  We go about our business, doing sanitized life, removed from much of the hardship that most of the world experiences regularly.

I'm just beginning to see that in many ways, these things don't serve me well.

They serve my flesh very well.  I enjoy the comforts.  I like things clean and pretty.  Sanitized suits me.

But, it doesn't serve my spirit well.  I am often lulled into thinking I can do my days without the power of the Holy Spirit.  I lean on my comforts, instead of my Savior.  Pain seems repulsive, instead of the path of suffering that Jesus walked for us and with us.  The pain is real, and it is often where we meet Christ.

Lord, please lead me to the places where you are and give me the courage to enter into the hard things.

I don't want to lead a sanitized life, because I no longer think that it is real.  I am searching for ways to do things differently, and while many of the answers are scary or still unknown, I am glad to be on this journey.