What Did You Expect?

One day a little over one year ago, I was driving into Wichita in a particularly stormy mood.  I won't go into much detail over why, but I will state for the record that it was a dark time in my life, marked with a great deal of bitterness.  There was a particular song by The Band Perry that was being overplayed by pretty much every radio station in Wichita at the time, called "If I Die Young."  I'm sure you've heard it.  If you haven't, you probably only listen to NPR or K-Love.  Or audio books.  Not that there is anything wrong with audio books.

However, I digress.  As I was listening to this song for the umpteen-millionth time that summer, there was a line that seemed to rise out of the storm of my own life for the first time.  "Oh, and life ain't always what you think it ought to be..."  WHAM.  I suddenly felt very foolish.  Let's back-track a little bit.

Over the previous year, I had tried over and over again to be things I wasn't, because I thought that I should be those things.  I tried to be a hero, mostly.  I was treating my own life like I was the main character.  And nothing was working out for me.  I was tired.  I was hurting from a back injury I had suffered in track.  I was frustrated with being stuck in Wichita.  Without getting overly personal, I was not happy about where I was in life.

I had just previously finished reading Stephen R. Lawhead's epic Byzantium, perhaps even the night before, I cannot recall precisely.

At any rate, without giving away too much about the book, there is a part towards the end where an embittered main character is asked by his own conscience what exactly he expected to happen on him after a long journey through dangerous parts of the world.  He sort of has an epiphany-type moment where he realizes that yes, bad things happened to him, but wasn't that to be expected?  When one travels a world full of wicked people and sin, sooner or later, something bad will happen.  We don't always get exactly what we want in life.

It all culminated for me at that point.  Did I honestly expect my whole life to go exactly like I hoped for it to go?  Bad things happen to everybody, because the world is a place full of sin.  It's like gravity.  Just about everybody knows someone who attempted to emulate Superman by jumping off of a roof or who took a chunk of ice to the forehead because they thought it would get close enough to the sun to melt and wouldn't fall back to hit them (guilty).  What did we expect?  That gravity didn't apply to us?  It does, and let me tell you, sometimes it hurts like the dickens.  It's near impossible to get up because of it from time to time.  Using the same concept, what do we expect in life?  Bad things will happen.  Life isn't always how WE think it ought to be.

And that brings me to another point.  Not every "bad" thing that happens to us is really all that bad, after all.  One of the things I wanted more than anything in life was to receive a scholarship to continue my track career out-of-state.  That didn't happen for me.  But that week, I was invited to Christian Challenge by a friend that I had met through track.  I originally declined, but after my realization that I had a seriously skewed worldview, I talked to another old friend, who also recommended that I go to Christian Challenge.  So I did.  And let me tell, my life has been nothing like I thought it should be.  It has been better.  Had I pursued my career as a track athlete, I wouldn't have had this opportunity in the same capacity that I have.  God knew exactly what I needed, and He took advantage of bad things happening in my life, and turned them into some of the sweetest things I have ever known.

So, remember.  Life isn't always what we think it ought to be, but what did you expect?