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Are you an overcomer?

by James Barringer  
2/19/2010 / Christian Living


Lance Armstrong is probably the most famous one-testicled man in the world.

That may seem like a strange beginning to a Christian essay, but if you have even a passing interest in sports, you know of Lance Armstrong, a champion bicycle racer who overcame testicular cancer en route to winning 7 consecutive runnings of the most famous bike race on the planet, the Tour De France. Even if you don't follow sports or know of Lance, I bet you've seen the yellow rubber "Livestrong" bracelets that everyone seems to have these days; those come from the Lance Armstrong Cancer Foundation. Lance is really a model of courage and persistence, and many people regard him as a hero for the strength and resilience that he has showed.

Why are we so drawn to people like that? It's not just that he wins; the New York Yankees win plenty, and millions of people hate them. Why do we speak approvingly of people like Thomas Edison, who failed hundreds of times in the attempt to find the right tungsten filament for the light bulb; or about the creator of WD-40, which got its name from the 39 failed attempts that preceded the right formula?

In short, why do we love people who overcome adversity, but hate encountering adversity in our own lives?

We understand, instinctively, that the end product of adversity is desirable. The patience, control, inner strength, and courage that come from any difficulty in life - those are things we all would love to have. I've never met a person who doesn't want to be more patient, but I don't know anyone who enjoys being placed in situations where patience is a requirement. Yet how else does patience grow? That brings us to the major struggle we all face inside: we want the end product of adversity - Armstrong's courage, Edison's persistence - but we don't want to go on the journey that will take us to that destination.

In fact, we hate pain so much that we structure our entire lives around avoiding it. Change is scary; we know this. Yet how many women stay in abusive relationships, simply because the real pain of being beaten is preferable to the potential pain of walking out and maybe being alone? How many men spend sixty hours a week at their jobs, hating the fact that they can't be home with their family, but unwilling to change jobs or dial back their spending so they don't have to work as much? I went through a time in my life when I didn't let anyone become close friends with me, because someone close to me had hurt me. How many people live their whole lives never realizing that the pain of change might be nothing next to the pleasure that waits on the other side?

From a purely human point of view, I certainly wish that God had a lower tolerance for pain. I wish he would somehow structure the world in a way that poverty, sexual slavery, and cancer didn't have to exist. Yet without cancer, there would be no Lance Armstrong. He would still exist, but he would merely be someone who rode a bicycle well - hardly the kind of role model that he is today. In short, if God hadn't allowed Lance to get cancer, Lance would never have had the chance to become all the things that make him great. How could he have possibly become courageous, if the world was free from every kind of pain or adversity that might require courage?

When people ask how God could allow adversity, the question is usually an accusation, spat out as if there is no answer, as if it's a proven fact of the universe that a God who allowed pain and disaster could in no way be good. I think the answer is quite the opposite: God allows those things precisely because he knows he is good. Not only is he good, he is powerful enough to take adversity and bring good out of it. He can use the toughest things we go through in order to make us patient, courageous, bold, and persistent. It's for our benefit, really; the fact that he conquers our problems is one of the ways we know that he's a big and powerful God. Because of that, we don't need to fear adversity, don't need to structure our lives around avoiding pain. We can live courageously, boldly, doing whatever God wants us to do, secure in the knowledge that any adversity that comes will be for the purpose of growing us, not defeating us.

Also, most of the pain that God "allows" is actually caused by people themselves, not by God at all. Children starve in Africa because of economic injustice, not divine wrath. The Western world, if we weren't so obsessed with consumerism, could quite easily pool our money and alleviate global poverty, but we choose not to, because of our greed. That's not God's adversity; that's us ignoring everything that the Bible says about how to use our money. 90% of our financial problems are caused by our own inefficient use of finances, or by our obsession with buying newer and better things that we shouldn't be. Women are abused not because our culture is paternal like some feminists would have you believe, but because men ignore the Bible's teaching about treating their wives with love. Maybe, instead of asking God why he allows adversity to exist, maybe we should ask ourselves why we allow adversity to exist.

Let me close by reminding you that, deep down, we all secretly admire adversity. At the very least, we admire the effects it has on people, and we respect the people who overcome it, the people who would never have been great people without it. Whether we like it or not, adversity plays a crucial role in our lives. We encounter it and choose either to defeat it or let it defeat us, which is why we're scared of it and try to avoid it, because sometimes it does defeat us. I think we also avoid it because we don't realize that God uses it for a purpose. Our lives can be permanently better for experiencing it. If we were never stretched, we would never grow. In your own life, what painful situations have defeated you? What has made you fearful and weak, prompting you to build your life around avoiding pain? What has made you strong, bold, and patient? You have seen how overcoming adversity has made you into the person you are today, and you know that if your life had somehow been free from adversity, you would not possess many of the things that you currently like about yourself.

People who demand to know why God would tolerate adversity don't really want God to do away with pain in the world. They don't want an entire earth full of spineless people who have never had to overcome difficulty. They want great men and women, strong and courageous people, heroes who can be admired. They want, in short, the effects of adversity. What those people are crying out for is not the abolition of pain, but the presence of a God stronger than pain. We have good news. That God exists, and he can be trusted today.

Among Jesus' final words in Revelation were assurances that "those who overcome" will receive eternal rewards. Not merely those who coast through life, not those who avoid pain, but those who face adversity head-on and punch it in the teeth, those who run it over and leave the corpse by the side of the road for everyone else to see. Essentially, he promises rewards to people who actually make God the God of their adversity, not by avoiding it, but by letting him conquer it. I pray that I'm one of those people.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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