Real Life Ain't Disney World

Real Life Ain’t Disney World


I love Disney World. Every employee is ingrained with the core value that the guests are the most important people on earth. Everyone smiles. There is a sense of peacefulness that is not reproduced in the typical theme park. Employees do not rush into work, throwing on their apron at the last minute. Rather they are actors who enter the park through specially camouflaged doors. I love Disney world but I couldn’t live there. It is nice but not real.

People do not always smile at you. Good fortune does not always fill your life with sunlight. There are times when the darkness of pain, trial, suffering and injustice consumes your existence. Facing the facts, living by faith involves an acceptance of the trials and suffering of life … not a pain free life but a deep rich abundant life. Accepting the facts is more than a passive endurance of pain but is also a decisive turning from a self absorbed obsession/pre-occupation with personal comfort, convenience and pleasure. It is as we accept and even embrace the reality of suffering that we come to know and understand God’s working in us.

It is in the real finite struggles of life that an infinite God reveals his love, grace, and power to us as well as to those around us. Skye Jethani quotes Dallas Willard, “We are not to try to get in a position to avoid trials. And we are not to ‘catastrophize’ and declare the ‘end of the world’ when things happen. Jethani goes on to say, “the trials of ordinary existence are the divine curricula for spiritual maturity. These are the laser beams God uses to put our old self, with it’s misappropriated desires, to death and then resurrect a new self with new desires focused on a more lasting joy". In other words although I really prefer comfort and a painless existence … that is neither my deepest need nor the way of greatest happiness. My greatest joy is in facing the trials with the empowerment, grace, inner strength and joy of a practical relationship with a personal God.