The Courage It Takes To Live Life (and Die)

NOT everyone is equipped with joy, peace and hope sufficient to live life well all the time. Indeed, no one is. We all have times in our lives when it takes an extra dose of courage to get out of bed or to get off the couch. Sometimes every movement brings pain. At other times we merely step, where each step is a testimony to courageous faith, even though we’d never see it as anything special at all. But it is. It’s special to struggle and keep going. But those who cannot go on are no less special.

There are fleeting travesties that take us from being a normal, well-adjusted soul into a fuming wreck of an existence. One seemingly innocuous action wreaks many subsequent tragedies. We can never tell what the time is bringing; only from hindsight can we see what has become history.

It takes courage to live this life; notwithstanding the masses of blessing poured over us each day by a God bringing us to life again each morning. And yet, we live in a highly physical world that makes a spiritual existence frail in its experience. Many times.

God knows how special each of us are. Those who struggle most he’s most proud of, I’m sure. Those who cannot go on, I’m sure, are bequeathed a special allotment of grace as they enter the heavenlies.

Those who’ve traversed the ether of exigent pain know how tenuous the will to live is. They have an empathy of those who’ve made a decision. Only as we witness a life being torn apart to its sinews can we attest to the brutality of life within anxiety and depression. Only empathy is due. No judgment. No condemnation. Only understanding where there can be no true understanding. Just compassion. No hard-heartedness. No words. Just prayers. Just prayerful kindness.

The courage it takes to live life seems so ho-hum to us who do so, day in, day out, without much ado. But there are those we work next to, those who are family members, and others we know well, who struggle arduously every waking second.

So let us look at life differently. Life’s not a thing to be glib about. Life’s a great struggle for many, and for many of us it gets to be impossible. Then we’re on a wing and a prayer for a time.

Drawing deeply upon breath for life,

Note the courage to simply breathe in and out,

Despite the fact of chiding doubt,

Our prayer is you get through your strife.

Please don’t imagine that life is easy for everyone. It’s not even easy for most, nor some. God doesn’t miss for a second the courage it takes to live this life.

Jesus said that we’d be overwhelmed in our grief. All we can do is take heart — that Jesus has overcome the world’s fetish to make sport of us — and live well while we wait in our waystation for our trip home.

Live courageously. Struggle honestly. Toil diligently. Fail without embarrassment. Get back up when you fall down. Repeat.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.