SunMar22008
Sin, Temptation, Mistakes and Obstacles; almost anyone would say that these four things are generally not good. The first two, sin and temptation, are inherently a part of who we are as humans. We are born with sin and temptation and we live with it throughout our everyday lives. Mistakes and obstacles are direct products of sin and temptation. If we succumb to sin and temptation then we are making a mistake; small or big it is a mistake, and we are then creating obstacles for ourselves to overcome. Now here comes the big revelation; guess who put these four things into our souls? God. Yes you heard me correctly, God did it; God placed these four aspects of our lives into our souls over two millennia ago when he created Adam and Eve. These things, while they are negative, are also some of the greatest gifts that God could have ever given us. Now I’ve always been taught that the polite thing to do is to immediately send a thank you note as soon as I receive a gift. This becomes slightly more difficult with God because I think the post office would get confused if they received a letter addressed to God: The Pearly Gates, Heaven.
So what can we do to express our thanks to God? The first and most immediate thing to do is to pray. God loves nothing more than for us to tell God about our day: about our triumphs and our tribulations, our goals and our setbacks. God created us for a reason and God cares about us so we can go to God with our problems. God is there to help which is why we’ve been given sin, temptation,
mistakes and obstacles. They help us in ways we cannot explain. They test not only our physically restricted human resolve but our limitless spiritual resolve. They challenge us to remain as faithful as we can to God and God’s son, Jesus Christ.
We see sin in our everyday lives when someone cuts the line at the security check through at the airport or someone trips us in the hallway going to our next class. But these are just the physical manifestations coming from the outside. We can easily find sin within ourselves, like when we make fun of the weird kid at school even though we’re convinced we strongly believe that bullying is horrible; or when we lie to a teacher about how the computer lost our homework instead of saying that we forgot.
Then there’s temptation – when we question if God is really there for us when we’ve recently experienced the loss of a loved one or when we lose faith because we cannot justify and prove that our God exists. Temptation and sin cut the connection between ourselves and God and destroy the once smooth road to salvation.
It is inevitable that we will make mistakes, especially in response to sin and temptation; it is part of human nature and it is how we learn and find new ways of doing things. When we make mistakes it is God’s wish that we learn from them and if we don’t we are disappointing God.
But even if we do fall into sin and temptation and make mistakes, this is not the end of the road. Because not only did God give us these obstacles, God also provided a safety net: redemption. Jesus died so that we could screw up and still be forgiven. So even if the world seems to be crashing down around us that doesn’t mean that God has abandoned us. Quite the opposite, actually, because God is just waiting for us to come back and be embraced as if we had never strayed from the path. And because God has provided this safety net and is waiting for us to get back up and try again we need to give back to God with our faithfulness.
When I was around 7 years old I was diagnosed with pancreatitis. I’m not going to bore you with the specifics but to make a long story short, pancreatitis causes pain that many doctors agree is some of the strongest pain out there. Its only cure is to not eat or drink a single thing until the pancreas has healed itself. Herein lies the problem; the pain may go on for days or weeks. So, obviously a person can’t survive without eating or drinking for days or weeks so I would be taken to the hospital to be provided with supplemental fluids through an IV. I would spend as little as 4 days to as many as 15 days in the hospital. We estimated the total number of times I went into the hospital between the ages of 7 and 12 was well over 35. I missed countless days of school and many vacations and my mom and step-dad even had to return early from their honeymoon because I was in the hospital two days after their wedding.
On May 8th 2006 I had a surgery that removed all sorts of things and cured me of pancreatitis. I have been living pain free for almost two years now. But I would never have been able to get through all of that hardship without my undying faith in God. God helped me deal with the pain, the stress of missing so much school and the setback that came with it, as well as the emotional toll that I could sense pancreatitis was taking on me towards the end. I couldn’t plan more than two weeks in advance because the threat of pancreatitis was constantly hovering over my head. Before I started accepting the fact that I would have to live with pancreatitis for an indefinite amount of time I had little faith in God even though my parents dragged me to church every week where I was especially happy to immediately escape to Sunday school. During one of my stays at the hospital I started feeling hopeless. My situation didn’t seem to be getting any better and in fact I noticed my stays in the hospital were getting longer. And so I did the only thing left to do and I prayed. I prayed to God to help me get through my latest hospital stay and that the doctors would find a solution. I prayed that God would stay with me and make the pain go away and that I would be able to go on my school trip the next week. I prayed and God answered. Within two days of praying for all of these things, I was out of the hospital and on a bus to Washington D.C. for a school trip and two years later I was waking up from a 14 hour surgery that would change my life.
This is exactly the kind of obstacle that God puts in our lives. This experience, although it does serve as a topic for a sermon I just found out I had to write two days ago, has strengthened me in ways that can scarcely be described. It has given me a greater sense of worth and has inspired me to make the most out of my life. I’ve come to realize that because I missed out on such a large part of my child hood I need to make the best out of every opportunity to have a great adulthood. I use this experience to fuel me to become a better writer and student so that I can live my dream of going to the University Of Cambridge in England. God gave me this experience not so that I would suffer through it but so that I would come to God and use it as a source of energy to achieve my goals. And so I feel the need to thank God for this unbelievable experience and the immeasurable worth I have received from it. Of course I do all the usual things that many teenagers would do such as various community service projects but unlike some high school kids I try and find a deeper worth to the service projects that I do and I attempt to learn everything I can from each experience and put that knowledge right back into another project as another way of giving back to God.
Our charge as humans is to face adversity and against all odds use our faith to overcome any and all obstacles set before us. God allows us to experience these things so we can become better human beings. God allows obstacles like Hurricane Katrina because if we are truly who we say we are as Christians then we will find a way to overcome such challenges and help those who struggle. God does not place these things in our lives to watch us struggle and fall; God allows these things to touch us so we can overcome and rise up and be strengthened by our experiences so that we can go out into the world and make it a better place and use those experiences as energy to achieve great goals. God allows these obstacles to be in our lives because God wants us to succeed. This is an immense gift, a gift so great that it can only be repaid in one way and that is to have faith in God. Only through faith in God can we pray, spread God’s word and succeed in our own lives and help others to succeed in theirs. God placed these things in our hearts not so we would be weighed down by them but so that we may be lifted towards God. We as Christians, every day, need to do as much as we physically and spiritually can to make the world a better place. If we do that then we have truly repaid God.