Wouldn’t it be nice if God at least let us Christians off the hook? I mean, we’re adopted into the family of God, so wouldn’t it be nice if, as His family members, He’d be like, “it’s ok, you don’t need to face the atrocities of this world”? I mean, if I had all the power in the world…if I were omnipotent like God, wouldn’t I spare my children pain?  And, you know what…I’ve even asked God this. God, I know You are omnipotent…why won’t You take this pain from me? Am I not Your son? Don’t You love me enough to take this away?  He didn’t, by the way. I still walked through those painful experiences.

Ah, Utopia.

A perfect life. A perfect world where all our days are just…perfect. 

No conflict. No squabbles. No pain. 

We’re all searching for that, aren’t we? We deserve to keep getting promotion after promotion. We shouldn’t receive calls from debt collectors, but our coffers should be full of abundance simultaneously while our homes full of all the fine things we want. And, shouldn’t our churches fill us with all the joy and knowledge of God without the fusses of conflict and questions about each other’s intentions or decision-making?

We hate pain. We hate the intrusion of detours to our perfectly made schedules. And, forget about those nasty diagnoses from Dr. So-and-So…I definitely don’t need to face that today. I don’t have time for dealing with sicknesses or other people’s “problems”, and please don’t mess up my already planned out life…it just won’t do.

Wouldn’t it be nice to find that our lives could be full of the “good stuff” and none of the bad? That, for once, our day would go the way I want it without someone or something coming along and messing it all up? 

Wouldn’t it be nice to get the respect I deserve? 

Well, ok…maybe that’s a bit too much to expect. I can roll with some minor inconveniences, you know, just some small issues here or there. But, only as long as I don’t face anything that would crush me flat. Other people are more apt to handle those life-altering circumstances than I am anyways. 

Yet, who can say they don’t face some, if not all the above? Whose life truly is a Utopia? 

I’ll go out on a limb here and say…no one. 

And, I think I have biblical warrant for thinking so. Take Romans 8:22 which says, “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” Why is the whole of creation groaning? It groans because of sin. It groans because Creation was subjected to sin and the disastrous results that our sin wrecked upon its “good” verdict. 

So, we live in a world wrecked by sin.

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