Some weeks are more tough than others. Some weeks you get huge tax returns, rebate checks in the mail, emails from long lost friends, free drinks at the pub, you find five dollars on the ground, you remember to buy your wife flowers (or your husband buys you flowers), the house stays clean, the carpets are vacuumed, floors swept. Those are the weeks where you go to bed before you’re tired so you remember cuddling with your wife, the very same weeks where you wake up feeling rested and actually ready for the day. Very often during those weeks you are finally successful in living out the “ideal” lifestyle that you have been trying to live for some time, eating a healthy breakfast, jogging (that’s -yahgging- with a silent J) in the early morning, reading those good books that help to transform you into a ‘better’ person, you spend time reading with your children, in other words you do all those things that you as an individual have deemed to be aspects of the ‘ideal’ lifestyle. Those are great weeks. Those are the weeks we live for, the weeks that remind you what life is/should be all about. We smile a lot, laugh a lot, kiss a lot, do lots of good things a lot.

Life doesn’t always go like that. Some weeks they say your baby has a deadly virus, some weeks you have loved ones pass away, you forget to eat until dinner, you lose a job, you lose your wallet, you say something stupid, you make people mad. It is always without fault during those weeks that your car breaks down, your wife gets sick, you run out of milk before you run out of Kix, and you burn your forearm on the bread oven at your place of work. If life always resembled these weeks you would become a pile of human flesh no longer resembling the beautifully exquisite creation that you once were. You might cry, you might watch a lot more TV, you might go into depression, you might fall off your respective wagon, you might eat one to many Western Bacon Cheeseburgers at Carl’s Jr. You might say and do many things that shouldn’t be said or done…but under the circumstances everybody and thier mom understands.

Life should be image one. Life often is found in image two. Image one, the good life, is where we want to be, where Christians pretend to be. It is in image two, in the pains, the scrapes, and the crap one so often experienced in life that we finds ourselves. It is pain that defines a person, not laughter. Your answers to the hurt, your joy (not happiness. I don’t think they’re the same) amidst the pain, your perseverance through it all is what shapes you and transforms you into something so much greater. I look good when I get my hefty tax return but I find digression much easier than progression as a friend, a father, a husband, or as a person on a spiritual journey. If you can wrestle with bad weeks, with death, and with pain; if you can find answers and healthy ways of understanding joy and hope in those moments you will be far better off than a fatty tax return.

I crave the good weeks, but my God is teaching me how to courageously stand in the mire that I’ve called Image Two. I’m not sure exactly what I am saying, or what any of this mean or looks like. But I like the way it sounds and I think that is a pretty good start.