“it is through our suffering that we are refined and defined…”
Sometimes life is like the hammer coming down on the chisel, or that is how it seems to me as I go through the ups and down of living with bipolar disorder, not to mention the regular daily struggles…
To enlarge this thought I’m going to have to jump to another idea first:
The way I see things starts with my belief in God. I believe in a God who is larger that the Universe, larger than any number of Universes that can exist, larger than the Big Bang and evolution and not opposed to them as methods of creation and change. I believe God is way bigger than what I can conceive.
To give you the basic outline – I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and I believe that the hope of Israel already lives, and is the ascended Messiah, Jesus.
I grew up as the son of a theologian and minister/teacher… I lived church from a very young age, and have many, many years of walking with this God I believe in – so to begin to know me you must know this is where everything begins…
And what does this have to do with that quote up at the top of this post? Just background material to give you an idea of how I think.
I listened to Gang of Four today while driving over to the MMJ dispensary to take photos and the lyrics to one of the songs said “How you think changes how you act” which is true in my opinion. How I think is built on my faith, which is built on my God, and changes how I act…
Suffering… How many people wish they could be God for a day and eliminate all the suffering in the world? No one likes it, it’s painful, and it has no point.
My worldview makes me see things very different. Though I do not desire suffering for myself or anyone else, it’s still going to happen. It’s pretty inevitable in a world of over 6 billion people all running on their own agenda. Some toes are gonna get stepped on, people are gonna get hurt, it’s just going to happen. Jesus said it would. He said in the gospel of John that “in this life you will have troubles…” but our troubles, our sufferings, don’t have to destroy us… they don’t have to be just pointless pain.
And to go back to where I started – what may look like suffering is just the fall of the hammer on the chisel, the strike of the master artist at work preparing His creation for it’s work. I believe in something after this life, and that the same detailed artist that created everything spent the same attention in creating me.
I don’t just think this as a nice religious thought that doesn’t have anything to do with reality… I’ve been actively watching the process for the last ten years at work in my life and have become spectacularly amazed at the ways in which God can and will work.
Ten years ago I was nothing more than a large block of stone in the workshop. Quarried and dragged to the master’s studio over the years. Then one day in early 1998 the hammer came down against the chisel, and this small, barely noticeable situation that always benefited me as an artist in the past, exploded into a large depression and a seemingly endless ride on the bipolarcoaster.
Ten years of sculpting. Finished yet? Not even close, but some much closer than ten years ago. Do I wish I could get off this ride? All the time. But I also want to stick around and see how this turns out, and what gets made from all this hammering…
To be continued…
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