Epic...

“Epic fail”

Aren’t you so cool if you use those words in a presentation, or a blog (like I have, shamelessly!), or on a TV show.  That’s the IN phrase right now. 

But it’s not so cool if you are the beneficiary of those words, right?  Then it’s more like Epic despair.

I’m thinking of that movie Elizabethtown, where the main guy has failed miserably -- and publicly --at his life’s goal of creating THE perfect sneaker.  We witness his epic failure and his epic despair.  It plays at our heartstrings -- but still, it’s entertainment.

Strange sort of entertainment . . . but it’s safe.  It’s someone else’s misery.  And after all, it’s just a made up story.

Or is it?

Well . . . yes, that particular story is made up. 

 But what about your own epic fail?  And my epic fail?  We have them, you know.  Those times in our lives that we are oh so willing to put behind us, to remember vaguely as that-hard-time-soooooo-long-ago-but-everything’s-good-now.  So many of us (like me) want to deny that we are anything less than “just fine” and that anything painful or bad has happened .

Yet . . . how silly are we?  Most of the time it’s obvious to everyone but us.  Like the alcoholic who admits his addiction to his best friend who has been praying for him for years, our epic fails and despairs aren’t going to be the secrets we think they are.  They are written all over our lives in one way or another.

But what God wants us to do with them is not hide them, but use them for His good:  “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies and God of all comfort; who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” II Corinthians 1:3,4.

 The God of all comfort and mercy will take care of our hurts, no matter how deep they go.  And when the time is right, he wants us to share our cup of comfort with others who need it. 

And that feels so much more right than denying those hurts ever existed.

It feels like epic joy.