Are you worth it?

Well, here I am with something to say. Doesn't happen very often, but when it does, the world stands up and...

...runs to the bathroom while the commercial is on.

It's one of the hard things of Christian thought to marry the combination of God's omniscience (that's 'all-powerful nature' for those of you who like country music) and our free will. I think I have made a breakthrough in this area.

Okay, it is probably tremendously elementary thinking theologically, but I would like to pretend it is a massive new way of putting things together and it is, after all, my blog.

One of the things that Christians (and all people, for that matter) struggle with is the meaning of suffering. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the book of Job is among the hardest. Its answers don't make sense a lot of the time, at least not to me. But maybe if they did, I wouldn't think on the things that I struggle with.

When things suck, and they will in every life from time to time, each person, as a free agent, has a decision to make. Am I worth perservering through all of this? Am I worth doing the hard thing and taking the next step and the one after that and the one after that, even though I am bone tired and my body aches for rest?

On the surface, that question would seem self-centered and maybe even self-absorbed, but I'm not certain that it is. I think that faith plays a key role in the answer to that question. After all, so much of the New Testament talks about perservering and running the good race.

We're spoiled, maybe, by television race coverage. We see only the winners. The guys who break the tape or gallop into the winner's circle or drink the bottle of milk. Sometimes, the best race is run by the person nursing an injury or racing with a heavy heart, or just plain having one thing go wrong after another. These people don't get the glory, but they might have run the best race.

Running the race is hard work. It requires us, sometimes, to continue on though physical, mental, or spiritual pain that can be blinding in intensity. But if we are worth it, we can have the courage to continue. God made us. We are His, fearfully and wonderfully made. By definition of our existence, we are worth perservering.

In my estimation, that is part of faith: the idea that no matter how hard the fight might be, we are worth the effort because God has said we are. He loved us so much that He gave His Son for us that we might have the ability to hang with him sometime later.

Maybe that is what it means to have faith, is simply to believe that.