The Truth About Life

“Life is pain,” the Dread Pirate Roberts (aka Westley) tells Buttercup in The Princess Bride. Frank Capra, on the other hand, says “it’s a wonderful life” in his Christmas movie by that name. One Sunday, as I filled in for our Sunday School teacher, I asked the class which movie had it right. After a little puzzlement (some had never seen The Princess Bride) — and some nudging from me — the consensus was that they both did. Life frequently is hard and painful, as both Westley and George Bailey could attest, but also often filled with beauty and wonder.

Right now, many people I know or know of — including in my own household and family — are navigating those hard and painful times in life. No doubt, many of you are navigating those times, as well, or you know of those who are. And even those of us enjoying a momentary personal respite — and it’s always only momentary — from those hard, painful times need only look at the news fed to us continuously on our phones and other devices to be tempted to despair.

Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and forest fires, along with wars, famine, hunger, and disease, all constantly afflict the world. As if those horrors were not enough, human beings also have an infinite capacity to devise evil to inflict on their fellow human beings. All of which is brought to our screens in living color regardless of how close or removed they are from where we live. So whether close or distant, in our own lives or the lives of those we know and care about, we’re daily reminded of the pain that permeates human existence.

Yet, we don’t have to go far to see the wonder and beauty that also permeate human existence. I live in a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the last vestiges of a slow-starting but glorious fall are slipping away. Last year, my husband and I visited the Grand Canyon, the beauty of which is impossible to describe. Despite the destructiveness of natural disasters, in places like those and others throughout this country and around the world, the physical beauty of God’s creation is still visible. And for all the evil and cruelty people can perpetrate on each other, the beauty of God’s image in fallen man is also still visible in the kindness and care people can demonstrate toward others.

As Christ’s followers, we have a calling to do what we can to mitigate this world’s pain and to show the world the wonderful — if not pain free — life Jesus offers. Jesus told the disciples to love their enemies and to pray for those who persecuted them, to do good to those that hated them and to bless those who cursed them. In our highly polarized culture, that’s a command Christians ought to take more seriously. The early Christians were known by their love – a love different from any the world had heretofore seen — and it changed that world. Christians today can do the same.

Christians have the one thing the world can’t give — hope. Hope for an angry, hurting world. Not hope in America. Not hope in political leaders. Not hope in world peace. America may fall. Political leaders can’t be trusted. World peace is but an empty dream. The only sure hope is hope in Jesus Christ. It’s a hope to love for, a hope to live for and, ultimately, a hope to die for. Because of this hope — and only this hope — Christians can love their enemies, do good to those that hate them, and thereby do what political leaders never can — change the world.

In a world so broken and beset with the consequences of the fall, the temptation to despair is always with us. But as people of hope, as Westley might say, despair does not become us. Instead, Christians can affirm with Westley that, yes, life is pain. Yet, because of this hope, at the same time still say with Frank Capra, “It’s a wonderful life.”