Beautiful Struggle

“The process of working out our salvation is a beautiful struggle”, so writes a deacon from a church in Alabama. I’ve not thought of the struggle as beautiful before.  For me, I equate the word “struggle” with the words difficult, unpleasant, and my own unwillingness to cooperate.  But I see, with great relief, that the deacon is right. 

When we want to become holy, we have to struggle for it.  It is not natural for any of us to put our brother first, turn the other cheek, or forgive seven times seventy. When we want to be physically healthy, we have to struggle for it. It is not natural for us to stay away from the coconut cream pie, BBQ ribs, or the Doritoes.

To lose weight, we avoid the good stuff to gain mastery over our appetites.  To become strong, we grunt and groan under the weight of weights.  These struggles are not bad because they are difficult, they are good because in their difficulty they produce the results we desire.

I sometimes pray for patience (when I’m in a good mood) because I have very little of it.  God gives me a circumstance that exercises the patience I have into something more durable. I work to hold my tongue and count to ten even though my insides are experiencing a nuclear meltdown. The struggle of holding my tongue is beautiful and that beauty does not turn into ugly just because my insides are churning at the same time. In fact, that is why the struggle is beautiful, because I am learning to ignore my inclination to verbalize the meltdown.

I think a lot of us have the tendency to put ourselves down too often. We think if we don’t mature easily then we must not be doing it right. We think that if we feel like giving it to Sos-and-Sos, but don’t, we are wretched because we wanted to.  We don’t give ourselves any credit or thank God for helping us, because we determine the bad feeling we feel is failure, negating the fact that we held our tongues.

Oh, we are so complex and we see things so complex, all the while God has given us the means to easily understand the beauty in our struggle if we just take our eyes off of ourselves and look on Him.

Long ago, a farmer would go to the chapel each morning to pray before starting his work.  One day the preacher of the church, Francis of Assisi, asked him, “What do you pray?”  The farmer replied, “I look on the Good God, and the Good God looks on me.” 

The farmer’s answer tells me he was a very serene man who understood the beautiful struggle of working out his salvation.