Psalm 90:15
What were your best days in the year 2000?
Let me guess!
I'd say the day is that brought you great happiness was:
the day you got married, or the day your child was born, or the day you started a new job,
or moved into a new house, or saw your child graduate from high school or college, or your vacation.
Surely, those are the kinds of memories that determine whether 2000 was a good year.
Would it shock you terribly, if I proposed that you evaluate the past 12 months -- not according
to their pleasure, but according to their afflictions?
Would it sound dreadfully pious if I suggested that the best days of the 2000 were not the ones
of unbroken sunshine, but dark days when trouble and disappointment clouded your sky?
As we come to the end of 2000, we do well to soak our souls in that sonorous psalm, which faces up
to the littleness of time and the greatness of eternity.
In the midst of majestic phrases that reflect on the fleeting nature of our human life, the psalmist offers
this remarkable prayer: "Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us
and the years wherein we have seen evil."
We can say right now that there were days that brought out some of the finest qualities in our character.
Subjected to pressure, we fumed and fretted and heated with anger -- maybe even went to pieces,
but a marvelous change took place, and we emerged from the refining process with a new realism,
a new patience, and a new courage.
To change the figure of speech, the human body has more muscles than most of us consciously use.
If you never walked from one place to another, if you never opened a door, if you never lifted
a weighty object, you would never develop the muscles in your legs and arms and stomach and back.
On the other hand, when you have done some heavy work or strenuous exercise, you begin to feel
muscles that you never knew you had.
The soul has muscles also, more than most of us consciously use.
We don't need to use them on our good days.
It is the bad days that develop our moral muscles and make us strong in spirit.
Isn't it amazing how pain, hardship, sorrow, and disappointment bringing out qualities of nobility
and goodness that we never knew were latent in our character?
Many of the world's great artists, poets, scientists, and musicians would be quick to tell us
that their bad days were the days of their most creative effort.
Our drug-oriented society would eliminate the thorns and anaesthetize us to a point
where we would not feel them.
That may explain why some of the sterner qualities of character are lacking in our drug-oriented society.
A civilization does not refine its soul or develop its moral muscles or produce its sweetest music
in conditions of unbroken happiness.
The bad days were also the days that strengthened our ties with other people.
It is true that the bad days strengthened our ties with other people.
You never heard it said, jokingly, that misery likes company, but that is no joke.
Sometimes, we cannot have company until we ourselves have been made miserable.
There is a fraternity among people who suffer.
This is a fellowship more sincere and profound than that which exists within any other group.
It takes affliction to initiate us into that worldwide fraternity; and when we do become members
we realize, perhaps for the first time, that we have actually joined the human race.
The bad days strengthened our human ties.
Insofar as we shared them with other people, we experienced a communion that we could never have
experienced in a shared happiness...
A common sorrow draws people closer to one another.
Of course, there are exceptions when it drives them apart.
Marriages have broken down because the love that flourished like a flower in the sunshine
could not stand under freezing temperatures and driving rain.
On the other hand, some marriages have been saved by a family tragedy in which husband and wife
reached out to each other as deep calling unto deep.
That's when they really discovered each other and realized how much they meant to each other,
how much they loved each other, and how much they needed each other.
The bad days were also the days that brought us into closer touch with reality.
In our anxiety and pain, we took a long, hard look at life and reorganized some of our values.
We saw the things that matter, and we saw the things that don't matter.
We loosened our grip on artificial supports and tightened our grip on reality.
The apostle Paul did that with his bad days, and he had plenty of them.
For some reason Paul flung a catalog of his sufferings in the face of the Christians at Corinth:
"We are afflicted in every way... perplexed... persecuted... struck down... always carrying
in the body the death of Jesus."
Then he says, "But we do not lose heart."
Why?
Because we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are not seen;
for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
That's how Paul reacted to his afflictions.
He did not allow them to crush and embitter him.
He looked beyond them to the things that really matter.
He looked to those eternal and imperishable values of the spirit that the world cannot destroy
and that death cannot take away.
It is no mystery that our age has been called the first secular age.
We are enjoying unprecedented affluence.
An age of affluence is never an age of faith.
Faith is never the child of our happier days.
We come closer to God in our suffering.
The great believers of history have always been the great sufferers.
The mightiest affirmation of faith ever spoken, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,"
came from the agony and pain of the cross.
Throughout history, we always hear those words spoken against the background of a cross.
Affliction is not a happy experience, but it can be a meeting place with God.
Perhaps, we shall meet God only in the days wherein we have been afflicted, and the years
wherein we have seen evil.
Goodbye, 2000!
Soon we shall close your book forever and open a new one in which a single word has not yet been written.
What will the record of 2001 be like?
What will the new year have in store for us?
We do not have to be reminded that there will be good days and bad days.
We do have to be reminded that the bad days need not be all bad.