My 18 year old is the youngest of five kids. That means that he’s suffered a lot of wedgies through the years. But hey, I figure that’ll give him stories he can tell his own kids someday. Some parents tell their children of the hardships of walking to and from school in the 12-foot snow—uphill both ways. My Daniel? He’ll be able to tell his children that he spent several years suffering through underwear with no waistbands. My friend Janet said he could call his life story, “Wedgie Tales.”
It’s a good reminder that tough situations, like waistbands, will come and go. The real question is, how will we respond? And will we allow those difficulties to defeat us or will we allow them to strengthen us? Will we rest in our Heavenly Father’s presence, seeing life from his eternal perspective? Or will we try to squirm out of those difficulties and make it through them on our own, pouting, whining, sputtering and blaming all along the way?
Stories of grace under pressure are so much more fun to pass on to our children. Those stories will even answer a lot of their questions about life and how we should live it. It will even set a pattern for them to follow. Now there’s a legacy.
In the Amplified version of 2 Corinthians 4:16-17 we read, “Therefore we do not become discouraged, utterly spiritless, exhausted, and wearied out through fear. Though the outer man is progressively decaying and wasting away, yet our inner self is being progressively renewed day after day. For our light, momentary affliction, this slight distress of the passing hour, is ever more and more abundantly preparing and producing and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory, beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!”
Waistbands? Here today, wedgied away tomorrow. Our bodies themselves are wasting away. But we’re to be focused on the things that are eternal—the unseen blessedness that never ceases. Verse 18 says, “Since we consider and look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are visible are temporal, brief and fleeting, but the things that are invisible are deathless and everlasting,” 2 Corinthians 4:18.
I’m fighting the urge to mention the fact that it says that the visible things are “brief” in the midst of all the wedgie-talk. Yeah, I’m totally leaving that one alone. But those invisible things? According to this passage, they’re everlasting! Maybe not ever-elastic. But everlasting and completely deathless, for sure. And ultimately, in our own personal “everlasting,” every question in this life, every why we’ve ever asked, will be answered in the most satisfying, resounding eternal-amen of an answer.
Pondering our everlasting, deathless future gives us an entirely different perspective on the momentary suffering. Even though here in the present there will still be questions left temporarily hanging.
Incidentally, among those unanswered questions, there’s still this one: Would you call a person with no waistbands left a “Wedge-etarian”?
BY RHONDA RHEA / COLUMNISTS