I wanted to relax a bit and decided to put on ‘the Passion of the Christ’. I saw it on its opening week and remember crying through much of it (and I am NOT a crier).  This being Lent season, I felt it only appropriate to dig it up and watch it again, but this time I couldn’t make it past the first 5 minutes before I had to turn it off.  I know the message of the movie was what I wanted, but I couldn’t deal with the extra stuff that I apparently missed the first time around – the complete misrepresentations that I assume were for cinematic effect. I couldn’t tolerate it.

If you aim to do something or be someone and you stumble a bit, that’s one thing. But to purposefully misrepresent yourself, facts, or a situation, for whatever reason, just grinds my gears. I probably have such an issue with it because I was good at it, rather, allowing it and even enabling it.

Example: Once I had a friend, someone I considered a best friend, who made no qualms about telling me (after 15 years of knowing them) that they knew they were a scumbag.  Now that’s pretty strong language and a pretty strong claim to admit in the first person (I know I am a scumbag).  It was a “clutch the pearls” moment — I’d known this person for what seemed like ever. I knew all the proverbial good they’d done (I also knew the evil they were capable of, but we’ll come back to that). My verbal and heart response was “Noooo…you’re not a scumbag…don’t say that!”  To add to that, I would accent those “good” things they seemed to have done in my mind to justify how I wanted to see them. I chose to only see their representative. Eventually, all I allowed myself to pretend got blown away because the scumbag fully surfaced and ripped through my life like a tornado, with no apology.  In hindsight I recognize that no matter what I wanted them to be, the real person was an outright mess. I know that what I should have done when I got this gem of information was to immediately state that if that is what they thought about themselves, and had no desire to fix it, then I had to exit stage left because I wasn’t going to allow their truth to become my nightmare.

Moral(s) of the Story:  if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, wears a “Ducks Rule” t-shirt, and will tell you it’s a duck…I can assure you that it is indeed an actual duck. And you are not obligated to accept a duck trying in vain to pass itself off as a swan.

I know it’s been said a million times – “if you are alive, you will go through something!” Here’s a million and one. If you are alive, you will go through something. Stuff will break and break down at the worst time. People will change, or stay the same.  You will get hired and hate the job; you will get fired and wish for the job back.  Inevitably, life will happen.  But here’s the rub, most people have two responses to the happenings of life: 1) I am all alone in this., and 2) Why me?

I beseech you to take a short moment of silence while those two lies die……..(I’ll wait)….

2) Why me? is the typical response when you just can’t understand why things are happening to you. You of all people – the “good guy”. You’ve done most things “right” (…well…except that summer a couple years back. It was a phase…). You just don’t understand.

But think about it outside of yourself. You may be dealing with an issue so that you can help someone else either get through the same thing, or avoid it all together. Even your most inconsequential mishaps can help someone else. Pretend you live in an apartment with a small living room. You stub your big toe on the end of the couch, literally, every day because you never measured the space and ordered a chair that didn’t actually fit. You finally get to move out and you happen to meet a set of people who are interested in your humble abode. Because your toe is still throbbing from the day’s impact, you make sure to advise them to check the size of any furniture they may have or may order to make sure it fits – so that they don’t have the same issue.  Silly as it may seem, your pain becomes their gain. You may have single-handedly ended the cycle of toe abuse.

And THAT’s what our troubles, whether light or major, are about.   So the question really should be “why NOT me?”