Sunday, April 26, 2015

Life isn't fair

This post isn't totally about me.
It's mostly about you.
And people like this:


a tired little family I saw on Trax a few weeks ago. The Dad is asleep. The mom was stressed out of her mind, their little trunk provided an extra seat for their boy and from the sound of their scattered conversations, that was as close to a home as they had right then.

And so I've been thinking.
I was born into a happy, functional, white, upper-middle class family in a gentle community with a healthy body and almost every opportunity I could possibly want be available to me.

I don't deserve it.

The past few weeks have hit me with this reminder.

It isn't fair that I have those privileges, but I do. 
It isn't fair that I was born with a race that isn't highly discriminated against, but I was. 
It isn't fair that of all the billions of people, I am part of a tiny percent that has the gospel of Jesus Christ in my life.  
It isn't fair that I was born with an amazing family, but I have 18.5 people to prove it. It isn't even fair that I have a personality that isn't heavily hindered by intense fear of meeting people. But that is what life (and God) has dealt me.

If this life was all there was, all of this unfairness would be a giant hole of depression. For people like me, I would wonder why I got so lucky. Why am I not the family who makes their home riding on Trax? And for others who go through endless amounts of hardships, there would be a lot of wondering what they had ever done to deserve all this?

But this past Easter season, I was hit by the realization that for the most part we didn't do anything to deserve any of this. The only thing we did, was decide we wanted these experiences. That choice is all it took.

The real title of the post should be "A non-Easter Easter post." Easter, and everything it celebrates - Christ's atonement, crucifixion, resurrection and continual ministry - means that in the end it will be fair. It won't matter what status we spent most of our life in, but just that we made it through life attempting to even those injustices as much as we can. 

I know it's past Easter, and this is a mini little sermon, but I just feel grateful  that life has been far better to me than I deserve and I need to better at helping others' life be similar. So sure, life is not fair. But someday it will be.

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