Pregnancy is exhausting. You spend the first 18ish weeks feeling like you'd like to take a nap as soon as you wake up. You would think that this means you sleep like a baby. Well, let me introduce you to a particularly sadistic hormone, progesterone, which floods your body as soon as you get pregnant. This is the hormone that causes much of your exhaustion. However, this hormone also causes you to have difficulty sleeping, waking you up throughout the night for no good reason. Twisted, right? Add to that a bladder that sits right under your ever growing uterus and you may have a lot of time to think when you'd rather be sleeping. All that to say, I've found myself with an excess of thoughts in the last couple of months and would like to get a few of them on paper...or at least on here.
So why the title, Life on Canvas? I love to paint. I'm not particularly good at it but I thoroughly enjoy it. There's something about creating from nothing that puts me in a much happier state. Just another way we are created in God's image I suppose. There's more to the title than that though.
In the last several years, Nate and I have been working out our theology. I've come to believe very strongly in several truths. I believe that God is sovereign over all, ordaining some to salvation and some to eternal misery, offering salvation through grace alone by faith, not through works. I also believe that we are personally accountable for our actions, called to be sanctified daily and to grow in holiness, and that our actions have consequences both now and eternally. These two things are both clear in Scripture and on a purely theological, academic level I have come to see how they work together rather than contradict each other. These truths are a great comfort to me and a foundation for much of what I believe. Sometimes, however, it's hard to understand how they work out in real life, outside of theology books.
I have had a favorite saying since high school---Life's what you make it. I don't believe in excuses and I don't believe in being a passive victim to every circumstance in life. What you do counts. Yes, your dad spent more time yelling and criticizing than he did loving you. That is difficult but it's not a free ticket to fail with your own kids. Learn from it, forgive him, and love the heck out of your kids. We have our own choices to make and the decisions matter. You hate how you look and feel? Start eating healthy and go for a walk everyday. Hate your job? Figure out what you would like and what you have to do to get there and do it! Live in fear of lung cancer? Stop smoking! Life's what you make of it.
But why doesn't it always work like that? Why does the guy who works his butt off doing what he loves and doing it well end up losing his job to no fault of his own? Why do some people who haven't smoked a day in their life die of lung cancer? Why does a woman who eats right, exercises daily, and lives a healthy lifestyle get stuck with a debilitating, painful disease? What we do matters and life is what you make it....but sometimes it's doesn't and it's not. That's when my neat little theology gets difficult to understand. I get that we're a sinful people and all of humanity is paying the cost of that sin. Everyone of us deserves a life of misery and an eternity in hell. I know that. But if doing the right thing doesn't mean you actually get the corresponding reward, why bother? God's in control of it all and yet our lives so often spin out of control no matter what we do. He is sovereign yet he has ordained for evil to exist right alongside the good and often evil seems to win out over good. How can that be? I know in my head that it's about perspective and about remembering the other truth-God's sovereignty and his salvation by grace. I've got to look at the big picture and see that God is triumphing over evil, the victory is already ours, and one day we'll get to have a never-ending victory celebration. I know that Scripture tells me that he is using all of these horrible things for our good somehow and for his glory. I know that our reward isn't always on this earth, sometimes it is much delayed. The problem is that knowing all of these things in my head doesn't always help stop the pain or the anger. Even though I know that we all deserve every misery, every disappointment, every tragedy. But it doesn't stop me from looking at those suffering--people who have faith in God and seek him daily--and thinking, "It's not fair. It's not right. They don't deserve that much pain." I've spent a great deal of time in the last six years wrestling with theology and working it out on paper so that God's sovereignty and Man's responsibility both make sense together. I think that I will spend the rest of my life struggling with how these two truths look in my life and the lives around me. I always feel like the father in Mark 9 who said, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" Thank God for being patient with me!
That was a really long explanation but the point is that life is a blank canvas to us. We get to paint on it so many things. Love, marriage, families, houses, degrees, experiences, knowledge, etc. But it's only blank to us. God is sovereign over all of those hopes and dreams and accomplishments. It is only by his grace that we get to paint all of these beautiful things and it is by his grace that we get to see beauty in our suffering and hope in our trials.
