Tag Archives: life

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When Bad Things Happen to Good People

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In fifth grade, my class held a contest to see who could read the most books. I had the credentials to win this contest. In the third grade, I had set the record for most books read over the year. It was somewhere in the sixties. And some of those books had been long. The Hobbit was on that list. Every summer, I participated in the library’s reading contest. It took me a week or two to get to the t-shirt reward for 1,000 pages read. I was not a reader to be messed with. It’s what I did.

That’s why it hurt so much when I lost the fifth grade contest.

See, there’s another lie that the world tells us. It’s that if you put in the work, if you do the right thing, and if you are a good person, then good tings happen. Sometimes, bad things happen to good people. 

I was listening to a podcast from Shane Hipps. He was talking about all of these righteous people that don’t get to experience the fruits of their righteousness. One of the stories was about Dirk Willems, a sixteenth century Dutch Baptist. Dirk Willems was being chased by a magistrate who wanted to execute him, and Dirk went across a thinly iced river. Dirk made it across, but the magistrate wasn’t so lucky. Dirk, feeling compelled to turn the other cheek, went back and saved the magistrate. The magistrate then captured him and executed him. Sometimes, bad things happen to good people.

Dirk Willems saving a magistrate and condemning himself

We are trained to believe that we should do good things because they lead to good rewards, but sometimes they don’t. We should do good things because they are good. I may not have won my fifth grade reading contest, but I did read a bunch of books for it, and that was good because it was good.

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Why Life is Cooler than Fictions

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I cleaned my apartment today. It’s something that’s been hanging over my head for some time. My life feels much more manageable now. It feels like I can actually get things done.

As I have procrastinated cleaning my apartment over the past couple of days, I have spent a lot of time watching television and movies. Television and movies are cool, I guess, but the more I watch them, the more I think that I use them as a crutch. I feel like I watch TV because I am too afraid to go out and live my own life.

It used to be cool to spend a lot of time in fictions. I got to experience things I couldn’t. When I was a kid, this was huge. I didn’t have the means to go visit a city by myself when I was a kid, and so reading stories about cities or watching films set in cities was really cool. But in a little over a month, I’m going to be 21. As far as the law is concerned, I will be an adult. But I’m still stuck in this notion that fictions are my gateway to experiencing life.

I know this seems a little crazy but I think life is my gateway to experiencing life.

I don’t think it’s as simple as walking out of my apartment every once in a while. That’s not going to fix anything. I think I’m afraid that I’m going to make a wrong decision, that I’m going to say something I don’t mean, write down words that don’t make sense.

But this is where television and life have a really convenient similarity: you are always allowed to change the channel.

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Love is Not a Currency

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If I ever write a book, I think it’s going to be called Lies People Tell You. Because there are a lot of them, and it would be easy to come up with new chapters.

There’s a lie out there that says we can run out of love.

That’s not true.

Love is not a currency. Let me repeat that: Love is not a currency.

You can’t run out.

I wrote a post about a week ago about reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I have one major problem with the book – the assumption that love is a resource we can waste. In the first chapter, Joshua Harris tells this story about a girl’s nightmare. She’s at the altar on her wedding day and as her husband is saying his vows, all of the girls he’s slept with start walking and standing around them. I’m rather sure love has nothing to do with all of this.

I think the reasoning for this kind of fear comes mostly from Proverbs 4:23, which says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring  of life.” Nowhere does this verse say “guard your heart or else you won’t be able to give it to your future spouse.” But that’s how a lot of us read it. And, certainly, sometimes it feels like that’s what’s true. We fall in love for the first time, and when it ends, it feels like we will never be able to love at that level again. That’s all just faulty reasoning, though.

I think we are supposed to guard our hearts because we are special and valuable, not because our hearts and our love are finite. God wants us to share our specialty and value with people who deserve it, people who have earned it. That makes sense to me.

We have been offered everlasting, infinite love. The least we can do is offer that to others.