Are you Happier than the Lady Downstairs?

I'm not a big fan of "Christian" novelists but occasionally, for light reading, I pick up one of the books that Johanna leaves out and work through it. Some are, obviously, better writers than others and I may read more of those.

I am currently reading Before I Wake by Dee Henderson in which my attention was caught by this conversation between two of the protagonists of the story:

"Isn't it strange … how hard we struggle to believe that God loves us, that God will do the right thing? The Bible says God is good. It's His personality, His nature. It's impossible for Him to do bad; it's outside His very character. And yet when we start to think about religion, about God, we spend most of our time trying to gather up the courage to trust and believe that God is actually going to be good to us and be willing to help us."

"I know. … But maybe it's expected. We live in a messy, painful, fallen world. We live surrounded by good people who turn out to be liars, by people we trust betraying us -- we live in a place where evil continually shows up and destroys what is good. And from that past we're supposed to look at God, and despite everything we've lived through, we're supposed to not attribute to Him any of the failings that beset everyone else we know."

And there's the heart of our postmodern problem of belief! Somehow, we have to come to understand that God is fundamentally different than every other person we have ever known. Then the awe of that has to strike us -- and then we need to believe in the awe!

This week we had the guy in to do the annual service on the heating unit for our apartment. He worked on ours and then on that of our neighbours across the hall, who are friends, fellow Christians and colleagues. He then went to the apartment below us to do the unit there. In the process of talking with everyone in his rudimentary English (he is a Flemish speaker as is the lady downstairs) he made the comment, "You seem so much happier that the lady downstairs!" Of course, in his mind, that was probably because we are foreigners from North America. Nevertheless, "You seem so much happier!" His way of saying, "You are different," and, without voicing it, asking a question: "What is different about you?"

What IS different about the people of faith? Just that: that we are people who have faith.

Do YOU want to be happier than the lady downstairs? Then, somehow you need to gather up your faith and believe that God is really as good as He says He is. And once you've done that, you need to live as if its true!

Profdifficile