NOT fine
“How are you? I am fine.” How many of you learned to start letters with this question and answer? I did. And that question, “How are you?” is ubiquitous. I ask and answer it all the time. I always say, “Fine.” But many times, the answer really is, “I’m NOT fine.” And the more I get to know people and their stories, the more I realize that we have no idea what people are going through in their lives, and when they say, “Fine,” just like me, they often are not fine.
So what do you do with that? Sometimes I feel like life is just one shit-storm after another. Or sometimes there’s not a storm, but something sad and hard and unfair that goes on and on and on and maybe will never end. So then what?
I don’t know the answer for everyone, but one part of my answer is to remind myself over and over again that God is with me. He is in me and I am in him. And he cares. Maybe he’s crying with me. Maybe he’s listening and understanding. Whatever—he’s loving me.
Recently I was talking to a friend who said he’d started thinking differently about God. He said he used to think of God as if he and God were in a garden, like the story of Adam and Eve, and he could walk and talk to God. But then he read some passages about us being in God, and part of the body of God.
“There is one body, but it has many parts. But all its many parts make up one body. It is the same with Christ” (2 Corinthians 12:12). Then it goes on to talk about how the ear cannot say, “I am not an eye so I can’t be part of the body,” Or the foot, “I am not a hand so I don’t belong,” and so on. Then each part, too, can’t say to another part, “I don’t need you.” We need all the parts, even “the parts of the body that seem to be weaker.” And it ends, “You are the body of Christ. Each one of you is a part of it” (2 Corinthians 12:27).
Reading this and other such passages, my friend started to think of himself as part of one body, part of God. It made him imagine God as this enormous, never-ending “body,” like the universe and all the galaxies and beyond. And he thought about how God, this huge universal thing like that, paid attention to him, this miniscule thing like a tiny little cell in God’s body. And God cares about my friend, small as he is. God feels his hurt, his joy, his every little thing.
How does that make you feel? What thoughts does it provoke?
For me: I love it! That combination of a God who is so immense, so all-encompassing, so un-understandable (and a part of that not understanding is this thing with bad things happening even though he’s a good God) cares about teeny tiny me. I am reminded of the awe I’ve felt at the workings of this universe and beyond, which is encompassed in this God. And touched by gratitude, even while I am living through whatever shit-storm is currently happening.
May you find the strength to endure and comfort in the knowledge of God’s love–even when you are NOT fine.