The Good News Amid the Bad News

What the recession makes very, very clear, if you can see it 

by John Ortberg

We posted a position for our church on Craigslist recently. We got 140 applications.

The Dow Jones is down. NASDAQ is down. Housing values are down.

Venture capital is down. Consumer confidence is down. Employment is down. Auto industry is down. Commercial real estate is down. Foreign markets are down.

Is anything going up?

Some things are. The opportunity to serve people in need is going up. The opportunity to trust God when trusting isn't easy is going up. The opportunity to build a faith that will last when the storms of life hit it is going up. The opportunity to help our churches become communities where people actually we get real with each other and love and support each other is going up.

We know this is true because certain truths remain unchanged:

God remains sovereign. The blood of Jesus is still more powerful than the stain of sin. The Holy Spirit still guides confused church leaders. The Bible is still the word of God. The tomb is still empty. Prayers still get answered. Love still beats bigotry. Hope still trumps despair. The church is still marching. The Kingdom is still alive and well, and does not need to be bailed out by a stimulus package.

The church has always faced hardship and crisis. Maybe—because our lives are often so easy—we actually are more frightened of hardship than Christians at any time over the past few thousand years.

Psychologist Jonathon Haidt had hypothetical exercise: Imagine that you have a child, and for five minutes you're given a script of what will be that child's life. You get an eraser. You can edit it. You can take out whatever you want.

You read that your child will have a learning disability in grade school. Reading, which comes easily for some kids, will be laborious for yours.

In high school, your kid will make a great circle of friends; then one of them will die of cancer.

After high school this child will actually get into the college they wanted to attend. While there, there will be a car crash, and your child will lose a leg and go through a difficult depression.

A few years later, your child will get a great job. Then lose that job in an economic downturn.

Your child will get married, but then go through the grief of separation.

You get this script for your child's life and have five minutes to edit it.

What would you erase?

Wouldn't you want to take out all the stuff that would cause them pain?

I am part of a generation of adults called "helicoptor parents," because we're constantly trying to swoop into our kid's educational life, relational life, sports life, etc. to make sure no one is mistreating them, no one is disappointing them. We want them to just experience one unobstructed success after another.

One Halloween a mom came to our door to trick or treat. Why didn't she send in her kid? Well, the weather's a little bad, she said; she was driving so he didn't have to walk in the mist.

But why not send him to the door? He had fallen asleep in the car, she said, so she didn't want him to have to wake up.

I felt like saying, "Why don't you eat all his candy and get his stomach ache for him, too—then he can be completely protected!"

If you could wave a wand, if you could erase every failure, setback, suffering and pain—are you sure it would be a good idea? Would it cause your child to grow up to be a better, stronger, more generous person? Is it possible that in some way people actually need adversity, setbacks, maybe even something like trauma to reach the fullest level of development and growth?

"Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything" (James 1:1-2).

Sometimes I can get caught up in the challenges of church life. We face financial needs that are always shifting. Leadership requirements keep going up. Emails can be happy; but sometimes cranky people write them. And send them to me. My own motives get messed up. I get anxious about our success, then feel guilty when I think about how I want to be running on better fuel.

So it helps me, in times like these, to live in the words of Paul. His adjectives are particularly striking, since he likely wrote these words in chains, under oppression, awaiting execution: "For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all" (2 Cor. 4:17).

Things are definitely looking up.