I love weird stories and heaven knows, our world is filled to overflowing with them. I was recently treated to one when some friends recounted something they witnessed in a restaurant.
My friends were seated near a table of hearty partyers and when someone in that group proposed a toast, everyone raised a mug or glass, including a woman who had a health issue that required her to use a feeding tube. As the celebrants began downing their beverages, this lady, undeterred by her digestive affliction, whipped out her feeding tube and a funnel, and proceeded to pour a mug of beer into it.
Now, there’s something you don’t see every day. It may have been a bit startling to onlookers, but I’m mighty impressed with this woman’s spunkiness in the face of adversity. My friends didn’t say if she tried to stuff anything else down her tube, perhaps a steak or baked potato, but I assume not since that would surely have caused the festivities to go sidewise in a big way.
This story started the hamster wheel in my head spinning as I thought about this lady’s determination not to sit on the sidelines while her friends celebrated. She could simply have raised a symbolic glass of water, but no, she wanted to be all in.
Do I live with that kind of fortitude and grit?
It’s been a tough stretch of road for us all as Covid has wrecked our routines and caused many to feel isolated and depressed. Some continue to battle a tormenting fear that they are dangling by a tiny thread over the abyss of doom.
In addition, the political and social turmoil we’re experiencing in our nation has added yet another shovelful of stress upon our already weary hearts and minds.
It’s easy to see how even the most hearty and optimistic among us might struggle to retain their “joie de vivre.”
I had hoped 2021 would bring a fresh start, but to be honest, it’s been 2020 and then some for me. I literally rang in the new year with Covid, followed by all kinds of medical poking and prodding (unrelated to Covid), followed by an onslaught of intense dental misery. All that, plus an unrelenting, sickening feeling in my politically conservative gut that our country is racing to you-know-where in a handbasket.
Many times this past year I’ve had to remind myself to pause, take a long view of my life, and play the tape all the way to the end. Thankfully, because I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, I know the end of my tape will be glorious. That’s not “pie in the sky,” it’s truth and the truth does, indeed, set us free in so many ways.
When I get mired in discouraging circumstances, maybe I feel a bit like those first disciples did when Jesus, the one on whom they’d pinned all their hopes, was crucified. He’d told them He would rise again, but in those few pre-resurrection days of grief, disappointment and confusion, they couldn’t comprehend His promise.
Then they saw the empty tomb and experienced what David, the psalmist king, had written centuries earlier: “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
We God-believing followers of Christ should have indestructible, befuddling hope, regardless of what’s presently happening to us and around us, because we know we’ll experience indescribable joy when our promised “morning” finally dawns.
I hope I’ll never need to pour beer down a feeding tube, but I pray I’ll have the kind of pluckiness that lady in the restaurant displayed and live in such a way that the people looking on will marvel at the difference Jesus makes in my life.