Living A Life Of Ease

Comparisons are the easiest things in the world to do. The rich complain about taxation, and the poor (ie, the ones sitting at home collecting the rich folks’ tax money) envy the rich. The career woman looks at the stay-at-home mom and says, "Imagine having no deadlines with thousands of dollars hanging in the balance," while the aforementioned mother thinks the childless woman’s life must be filled with glamour and ease.

I talk about comparisons because I have a good life. Fairly nice house, fairly nice car, some money in the bank, some nice clothes in the closet, growing business, and a cleaning lady. (It’s that last that puts most people over the edge.) Nice life. Good life. God has blessed me, and I know it.

AND this morning I told the Lord that the never-ending pressure was more than I could take for one more day.

Maybe the good life isn’t quite what any of us thought it would be.

The reality, you see, is that there is no set of circumstances that makes life easy. Oh, there are certainly some things that make life more difficult (chronic illness, catastrophic loss, etc) but we’re deceived if we look at anyone and say, "their life must be easy, because they have …" or "… because they don’t have …" What we do or don’t have isn’t what does or doesn’t make life easy.

"Easy" comes one way, and one way only.

Let me repeat myself, in case you didn’t catch it: "easy" comes one Way, and one Way only.

My yoke, Jesus said, is easy. My burden, Jesus said, is light. Easy because he’s in it with me. Light because he’s carrying the load. But how do we get there? That’s the hard part. In another place, we’re told to "labor to enter in rest." Working doesn’t earn us rest, but it’s rather hard work to enter into rest. If ease was easy, we’d all be doing it!

At times in the past, I’ve been able to look at my life and find things that I needed to cut or needed to add. These days, as far as I know and after considerable prayer, the only thing I know must go is anxiety. I’ve dropped everything I can drop, and I’ve hired someone to do everything that can be hired out. Now it’s time to give it all to Jesus.

That means that when the next phone call comes, from someone who wants something now, if not sooner, I ask the Lord to resolve the situation or else give me the supernatural ability to do so. It means that when I can’t make somebody happy, I remind the Lord that He’s the only one I need to please, and that He’s pleased when I put my weight on Him.

The pressure and the demands will only increase. If I want to survive, I need to make a career change: my new job is believing God. Regardless of what anyone thinks.

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