Apparently, I Missed the Fine Print

I have been looking through my “Welcome to a New Life in Christ” packet, and apparently I am missing a page.

You know the one.

YOUR NEW MEMBER BENEFITS!

Congratulations on your decision to follow Jesus! Please enjoy your complimentary lifetime package, which includes financial security, excellent health, agreeable relatives, cooperative children, painless aging, answered prayers within three to five business days, pleasant weather conditions at all times, and the assurance that nothing deeply disappointing will ever enter your personal space.

I would particularly like to locate the section on painless aging.

Surely there must also be a gold-level membership somewhere. Perhaps that is where they keep the guarantees against faulty appliances, mechanical failures, technical malfunctions, equipment breakdowns, and doctors who say, “I’d like to run a few more tests,” along with children who consistently make decisions that allow their mothers to sleep peacefully through the night.

And since we are Christians, naturally there would be a special prayer concierge. Simply submit your request, select the desired answer from the drop-down menu, and allow twenty-four to forty-eight hours for processing. For urgent requests, please check the box marked MIRACLE NEEDED IMMEDIATELY.

I am being ridiculous, of course.

But I wonder sometimes whether there isn’t a little piece of that imaginary brochure tucked away somewhere in our expectations. We would never say that becoming a follower of Christ means nothing painful should happen to us. We know better than that. At least, we know it while everything is going reasonably well.

Then something happens that doesn’t fit the brochure in our head. The phone rings with news we never wanted to hear. Someone we trusted wounds us. Money gets tight. A marriage breaks. A child wanders. The doctor grows quiet while looking at the results. We pray fervently, faithfully, repeatedly—and the answer we wanted does not come.

Suddenly the theology we could explain so easily from a comfortable chair becomes much harder to live.

But whenever I am tempted to believe that belonging to God automatically gives me some kind of exemption from suffering, I have to look at the life of the One I am following. And that is where my imaginary brochure falls to pieces.

If anyone ever had the right to expect preferential treatment, surely it was Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Yet there was nothing remotely charmed about His earthly life.

The King of heaven arrived without a palace. There was no royal nursery prepared for Him, no carved cradle waiting beneath embroidered blankets. His mother laid Him in a manger. The One who had spoken worlds into existence entered this one amid the smells and sounds of a place meant for animals.

He grew up without earthly grandeur and worked with His hands. Later He would say, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).

Think about the strange simplicity of His life. The One who owned the cattle upon a thousand hills had no estate to return to at night. When He entered Jerusalem, the donkey beneath Him was borrowed. The room where He ate His final meal with His disciples was borrowed. After men had finished beating, mocking, stripping, and crucifying Him, even the grave that received His body belonged to somebody else.

He came possessing little, although everything was His.

And poverty was hardly the worst of it.

The hands that had fashioned humanity were bound by human hands. The One before whom angels bowed was struck in the face and spat upon by the creatures He had made. The voice that had commanded the wind and waves was drowned beneath ridicule. One friend betrayed Him for money. Another denied knowing Him. Others fled when remaining became dangerous.

Then they nailed Him to a cross.

That is the part that silences all my imaginary fine print.

Christianity did not begin with a Savior demonstrating how to obtain a trouble-free life. It began with a Savior showing us what perfect trust in the Father looks like while walking through a world ravaged by sin.

Jesus never concealed this from His followers. “In the world ye shall have tribulation,” He said (John 16:33).

There goes the brochure.

But thankfully, that is not where His sentence ended.

“Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

Jesus never promised that following Him would prevent my heart from breaking. He promised that heartbreak would not have the final word. He never promised that I would understand every dark stretch of road. But He did promise, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).

There will be days when the table is full and days when there is an empty chair. There will be prayers answered exactly as we hoped and others whose answers we may not understand this side of eternity. There will be mountaintops, valleys, laughter, funerals, beginnings, endings, victories, disappointments, and probably at least one appliance that chooses the worst possible moment to die.

None of those things determines whether God is good.

Calvary already settled that question.

When I look at Jesus, I see a God who did not remain comfortably removed from human suffering. He stepped into it. He knows betrayal from the inside. He knows exhaustion, loneliness, injustice, grief, physical agony, and tears. There is no dark valley I can enter where I will find Him unfamiliar with sorrow.

So when my road becomes difficult, I no longer need to search frantically for the missing brochure and wonder which promise God failed to keep. He never promised me exemption from the hard things of this life. He promised me His presence through them—and a world to come where the hard things will finally be no more.

At the end of this battered, beautiful, sometimes bewildering journey, there is another promise waiting: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4).

Apparently, I didn’t miss the fine print after all.

There wasn’t any.

Jesus told us plainly that this world would bring tribulation. What I had missed was the rest of the promise:

“Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

If this Fireside Chat warmed your spirit and sparked fresh resolve to live what you believe, fan that flame with Scripture—“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). Pull a little closer to the Light, and carry it into the week ahead.

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