Hope

Cross & Crown

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It seems like every little girl loves to dress up and play princess. From my experience, Disney princesses are usually favored identities to assume. Adorning crowns and “twirly” dresses, young ones imagine themselves as blissful royals ready to take on their own little part of the make-believe world.

The funny thing is that I’ve never met a little girl who plays the part of the princess prior to their transformation. The part of Cinderella scrubbing the floors is usually left to the movie – it is not the stuff of little ones’ dress-up time. No child is Snow White banished to the woods. We love the happily-ever-after parts of fairytales, and those are the roles we relish playing.

In a similar way we must remember that there are two parts to every Christian’s story. It is not just about the crown of glory that we will one day receive – a day that will be greater than any happily-ever-after ending that Disney concocted. It is also about the cross that we must bear while on this Earth. The Christian’s story ends in Paradise, but the road to get there does not promise to be easy.

As William Barclay wrote:

To be chosen by God so often means at one and the same time a crown of joy and a cross of sorrow. The piercing truth is that God does not choose a person for ease and comfort and selfish joy but for a task that will take all that head and heart and hand can bring to it. God chooses us in order to use us.

Unlike the Disney princess, the Christian can joyfully approach their trials, knowing the ending that is in store. The day that we receive our eternal crown will be a glorious one indeed. In the meantime, let us not abandon the cross that God has chosen for us, but instead take it up daily  in order to follow and be used by Him (Lk. 9:23).

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Hope

See

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When I was younger, I prided myself in my “perfect” eyesight. I thought it was an impressive thing that I had 20/20 vision and presumed that it would stay like that for a long time. God had different plans and eventually I received a prescription for glasses. However, even then my glasses didn’t really seem “necessary.” I could still see just fine for the most part and didn’t quite understand why I needed them, except for the fact that the doctor thought it might help. It wasn’t until a different doctor explained to me that he thought I had a stigmatism that it began to make sense. When I looked straight on at something, things were crisp and clear. It was the edges of my field of view that were fuzzy. My eyes were straining even though I wasn’t aware that they were.*

Over the past year, I have learned that this propensity isn’t just limited to the things I see with my eyes, but how I view life. When I look at things straight on, I can think I have a clear understanding of what’s going on. However, the edges are fuzzy. I don’t understand how God is working in the peripheral to bring about His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). I can become so intent at looking at the hard things, that I miss the blessings that He has brought. I get so focused on getting through the bad, that I forget to see the good.

That is why, over the past year, the following verse has resonated in my heart time and time again:

I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord  in the land of the living. (Psalm 27:13, NIV)

There are two parts to this verse:

  • “I remain confident of this” – The first question I had to ask myself is whether I had this confidence. This isn’t to say that I doubted God’s goodness; I didn’t. But there had been moments in the past few years where I’ve been so focused on the goodness that was to come in eternity, that my confidence of the goodness I would see in this life was lacking. God has prepared a wonderful future for His children, but He also desires to give good gifts to them now (Mat. 7:11). Am I remaining confident in the goodness that He will provide?
  • “I will see the goodness of the Lord” – One of the things that acquiring glasses taught me is that we can think we are seeing clearly, when really we aren’t. Just like my glasses help “train” my eyes to view things with greater clarity, I had to train myself to see God’s goodness, even when it wasn’t where my attention naturally focused. God is always at work in His children’s lives – and that means that He is actively purposing to bring about good for them. Am I seeing the goodness of the Lord or am I so focused on other things that I’m missing it?

God’s goodness in our lives may look a lot different than we expected. Sometimes it means that dreams and plans we had don’t happen when we anticipated. It may mean that the roads He takes us down leads us in unanticipated directions. But as we remain confident in His plan, and the goodness that He brings, we can see Him even in the twists and turns, and over time, the edges become less fuzzy as we see His hand in it all.

 

 

*This is my admittedly amateur understanding of my stigmatism. If you are an optometrist, my apologies for how I may have butchered the actual diagnosis.

 

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