Expecting Good

Friday evening, everything hit at once. Exhaustion (from a long week and from an intense work­out session), anxiety (over a sick cat and anemic finances), and those lovely little hormones that all women would like to banish forever. The result? I was down. Like, I mean, DOWN.

I knew I needed rest more than anything else, so I rested. But on Saturday afternoon, I decided to read a Christian novel that I’d gotten from the library.

It was well­written, and definitely well­intentioned. However, the Christian family on whom the novel (part of a series) focuses is not your average Christian family. Mom fights off cancer. Son gets a girl pregnant. One unmarried daughter comes home from Paris both pregnant and HIV-positive. Another daughter can’t have children. The husband of yet another daughter is on-site for 9-11 (I couldn’t make out if he survived, or if she remarried). The daughter highlighted in this particular novel has a daughter who survives drowning with severe brain damage, and a husband who temporarily abandons her and gets hooked on pain killers.

Not exactly what you wish to read about to help you get UP, hey?

I will probably not read any more of her novels (which seem to all be tragic), and there are two reasons.

The first is that it’s way too easy to accept a picture of life that is presented to us. And the fact is that although tragedies do happen occasionally, life is not one big tragedy. Just as sailors feared the doldrums more than the storms, so, for us, the humdrum of life is the real enemy that we face. Just as falling in love and living happily ever after is an unrealistic picture, so is a picture of never­ending tragedy with a few happy moments tossed in between.

The second is that anything that presents the concept of life as a tragedy­be it the news, a novel, or common gossip­makes it more difficult to expect good. If you’re naturally up­beat, or if your circumstances or friends are uplifting to you, then you may be able to safely expose yourself to a few "downers." But if you’re like me, and NONE of those things is true—if you stay afloat only by doing what King David did, encouraging yourself in the Lord—then you’d do well to stay far away from anything that makes it that much harder to expect good.

Why? Because the crown goes to those who hang in there to the end. You can’t hang in there to the end unless you expect good. (Would you bother cleaning the house yet again if you believed it would burn down tomorrow? I don’t think so!) You can’t obey God with anything close to a right attitude unless you expect good.

We’re not talking about if you’re a pessimist or an optimist. We’re talking about a prerequisite to being a fit representative for God on the earth. It is not an option; it’s mandatory.

Expect good.

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