“They say life is but a dream, but if so, there are too many abrupt wake-ups in it.”

A thought by Kyle Idleman, (2015-10-01) from his book, The End of Me: Where Real Life in the Upside-Down Ways of Jesus Begins (Kindle Locations 330-331). David C. Cook. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title of the book to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

Do you hate that? I mean the dream is just getting good and you wake up. You try to go back to sleep but you can’t.

Life can be like that. Everything is going great and then in just a moment it all changes. Kyle says, “Life has a way of waking everybody up at some point. Everybody has that sudden, painful longing for yesterday, when they didn’t know how good they had it, just before the world fell in. When that happens— and if it hasn’t, it will— Jesus says, You are blessed.” Wait a minute, I am blessed.

Over in Matthew 5.4 Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” What is he talking about?

Kyle says, “We do everything we can to stay away from suffering in the first place. But when we do suffer, which is inevitable, we do everything we can to stay away from mourning. Then, when we catch ourselves mourning, we do all in our power to make it go away. We numb ourselves with entertainment. We medicate the pain with drinking, shopping, working, or partying. It’s a grim quest to turn that frown upside down, but we are convinced that’s what it means to be blessed.”

He goes one, “When disaster comes, we can’t see anything bigger than what we’ve lost. But the truth is, God more than fills that space. We begin to see that he’s not just filling that space, but spaces we didn’t even know we had.”

He goes on, “Everyone experiences loss. Everyone mourns. But those who follow Jesus find that their pain is not wasted. There is a blessing that seems totally illogical. It requires climbing to the bottom of the deepest pit, without a flashlight, venturing far into the darkness. But the blessing is there, and it’s worth everything.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 says, “There’s nothing life can throw at us that God can’t use to draw us nearer to him.”

So where are you suffering?

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