For my whole life, I've been a Christian. I don't have any glorious redemption story, I don't even remember the time I actually gave my life to Christ. Everyone knows that I'm a Christian and for anyone else, I'm not afraid to let them know.
But that doesn't mean I'm without my own struggles. For the past year or so I've been growing a lot, and in tow with any growth I might have gained has been a load of troubles that seem ten times larger and more significant than any actual progress I might've made. The dynamics of a friendship would change for the worse, someone would challenge my views on purity and integrity, I'd be confronted with faith-based questions I cannot answer, or I would fail miserably at something I cared about yet another time. I always came out of the situation less than happy, to say the least. I hated it. I hated dealing with another failure. I didn't know why this was happening. All I felt I could do was trudge on with an ever-wrinkled forehead to try to face the next battle.
It got to the point where I learned how to get out of my problems, if only by just callousing myself and ignoring it until it went away. I would avoid taking up responsibility or taking any initiative to do anything truly worthwhile. I had even quietly crept out of the potential of a close friend, for fear of letting someone down like I always seem to do. To care for anything valuable was a foreign idea to me, soon enough. "Don't invest yourself in anything, don't be ashamed of its outcome" became an unconscious philosophy.
I didn't have a reason to put up with things that challenged me, troubled me, even refined me.
This lifestyle is all well and good for any human being, if they want to end up a hollow, grey, lonely creature.
Knowing I was in a rut, I tried fixing myself. I knew I loved Jesus, and I knew the textbook Christianese ways of finding redemption, but at that point I simply could not handle another bubblegummy sheltered solution to a problem that made me sick. So I would try to come up with random ways that might, just maybe, make my life better.
It didn't work.
So I lived life, put on a smile.
But all I really needed was a little genuine encouragement from someone who actually understood me and understood why my life is how it is.
Fast forward to the almost-now: My youth group went to a retreat at Beechpoint Camp. During one of the sessions, our youth leaders had us each write out a prophetic word of encouragement on a small sheet of paper and put it in a hat to be randomly drawn by someone else. I wrote something sort of neat, sort of generic but still genuine. I stuck it in the hat and really wanted to draw my random word from God.
I reached my hand into the hat extended by a youth leader named Chrissy, grabbed one from the bottom and started lifting it out when I realized that paper was familiar.
"Oh- I just grabbed my own prophecy!" I basically exclaimed. Now, you see, I've had something of a history with accidentally reclaiming my own contribution to these random encouragement games. I always put on a sweet face and take it as the encouragement it's supposed to be- even just seconds before I grabbed that paper, I was telling a girl that drawing your own sheet can happen but it's just as much from God. But, really, I'm always disappointed with myself.
I almost continued to take it out of the hat, but Chrissy stopped me and told me to grab another piece of paper. I was hesitant, but I complied because I really didn't want to look at my word again.
I unfolded the paper, and I read. Instantly I knew, this was for me. This was actually, intentionally, written for me.
It was from a chapter of the Bible I've always loved, and something I long ago held myself to. I've done a Bible study on these words, I've read them over again in my free time. It is some of the most honestly real encouragement and actual straightforward explanation I've found in the Bible. And that to me is comforting.
The passage is this:
1 Peter 1:7-9
These trials have come so that your faith, of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire, may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiver the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
There is a reason for awful things to happen, and it's not always just a consequence of your shortcomings. It's to prove that there's still a reason worth fighting, and more importantly, you've been shown that reason.
