Rewriting the Script
Something has been happening lately that has really been bothering me. I’ve been complaining. In my head. All the time. Life feels too overwhelming. I don’t have patience and I’m frustrated. I don’t want to be this way. I do not want to be a crabby person. I don’t want to live always wishing things were easier. My whole life has been impacted by the gospel — why don’t the thoughts inside of me look more like it?
I am feeling the hardness of life and my sinful reaction to it is carrying me down into the pit of complaining. It really is a pit because once I’m complaining in my mind it just builds and builds until the hardness of life seems insurmountable. I do have to acknowledge there is real hardness in my life. My son Henryk passed away just over two years ago. It was, and still is, tragic. I wish his death did not happen. I wish he were still here. But my sin is making the tragedy even bigger. It’s hard to imagine that it could be made worse, but of course, sin can take on that job and do it well. Through counseling, God has taken me through a lot of processing Henryk’s death — processing God’s existence, his sovereignty, his love, his wisdom, my anger towards him, and on and on. But I don’t want to stop here and just fall into the steps of a complaining life, even if it means I’m not as actively upset at God as I once was.
Into the Darkness
Here’s how this kind of complaining looks. Something unfortunate occurs, probably nothing major. An example would be my daughter Lily swallowing water in swimming lessons, and it then giving her a stomach ache. While I’m sitting at the edge of the pool, this is not the only thing happening in my mind.
In my mind, thoughts from the past three years are zipping through in varying levels of detail, all building up to this moment. I think, “Henryk was so sick and died so slowly, I cried for over a year straight, then we couldn’t get pregnant when we tried again, and I had to deal with surgery and meds, then I got pregnant and felt super sick, then Lily started struggling with daily anxiety, and now I feel like I’m the size of a whale, and now Lily swallowed too much water in swimming lessons! I cannot handle this!” Every present inconvenience is compounded by the iceberg of pain beneath my current reality. Difficult circumstances — ones that should be isolated as single events in my experience — feel like just another strike against my soul. I use the hard things in life as fuel for why everything in life is unfair and horrible.
This system is very wrong. I know as well as anyone that the small problems in life are just that — they are nothing compared to the real tragedies that we can go through. My daughter swallowing a little water in swim class is not a big deal.
The Healing Work
God has done so much faithful healing work in my life. I thought I would never have good days again, and I do. I do not want my sin now to push against that healing work and bring more terrible days. What do I do in response? Should I think of all the good things I’ve got? Even though I have a long list of wonderful blessings that I could focus on, that’s not enough. It’s just not sustainable. There is no real help in a Pollyanna exercise. Looking on the “bright side” and “just being happy” can be dangerously hurtful in a world where everything is not okay. It can deny the real work that we need to do to address our disappointments. More significantly, it can dull our need for the gospel that goes much deeper than a few good circumstances.
In Psalm 51, David is approaching God, asking for forgiveness for great sin that he has committed. And David prays wonderfully in verses 7–12 to address this problem of perpetual complaining.
He asks God to make him clean, to let him hear joy, to blot out his sins, to not take the Holy Spirit away from him, and finally, to “restore me to the joy of your salvation.” The joy of salvation, this is the key! In the backdrop of my daily life, which song blares the loudest — that the world is broken, or that Jesus is risen? How do I evaluate my life — by the sadness in it or by the glory revealed to me? Which circumstances do I focus on — the ones I wish were different, or the ones I cling to for hope?
How can I change my mind’s script to reflect on the true basis of my life?
I already wrote the negative script above. Let’s try the truth.
The Truth Script
God chose to break into my life of selfishness and orient my entire being around the truth of his son Jesus — the one resurrected and glorified for my good. Because of my salvation, ten years ago God gave me a husband who enjoys the same salvation I do, and whose vision of love for me is huge. God did a sanctifying work in my life that caused me to view children as a good gift, and he put in me a desire to have my own. He gave me a daughter who is more than her parents will ever be, and because of the gospel, she will be an oak. God chose to give me a little boy who was really sick and instead of taking the sickness away like we asked, God gave us more of himself. He gave me grace to endure the continual bad news and he gave me strength that I had no earthly reason to possess. Henryk’s inheritance in heaven is not second best to God healing him on earth. God has now given us another daughter in the womb who will bring us gospel joy, no matter how long we get to have her. God has given me friends and family to uphold me, and friends and family to uphold them — all in a depth of relationship that I could never have imagined apart from the gospel.
God’s intention for my life is not for it to look like how I would define it as best. As Nancy Guthrie has said, Jesus didn’t die on the cross so that I would have a certain life of ease now. He died on the cross to rid me of sickness and pain in my soul, and to bring me to life in him, both now and for eternity. On the last day, I will not put up my hand and say, “I was cheated!”