Wednesday, 9 December 2015

Upside down (Part I)

Some days ago, I told a friend that having a child turned my life upside down... and having waited for a year plus, I was beginning to get a little disillusioned that life wasn't turning the right side up yet.

She suggested that I would probably never turn the right side up. "Might as well get used to that view..." (I could so picture her giggling while texting me back from her end of the world.)

Oh great.

I thought of Billy Sunday, who once remarked: "The world is wrong side up. It needs to be turned upside down in order to be right side up."

So perhaps my life was the wrong side up all this while. Taking on God's divine assignment - wait, not the assignment per se but believing in Jesus and living for Him - turned my life upside down so that it could be the right side up. The upside down world is one filled with unmatched, utmost joy, and yet also, the deepest kind of sadness.

Grief. Pain. Distress. Internal conflicts. Tears. The hardships of being counter-cultural. Not a particularly easy view to get used to. In fact, it can be hard to think of it as the right view when the world offers all kinds of ways to avoid suffering too much - because it's supposedly bad to suffer. You must have offended the gods. Or think karma. The permanence or efficacy of the antidotes are questionable of course.

Why then embrace the suffering one is entitled to as a Christian... as something possibly good?

Why be a Christian? Why walk your life upside down?

To be continued in Upside down (Part II).

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