Not Mutually Exclusive

#85

Friend,

“I’ve come to learn that the good life and the hard life are not mutually exclusive.”

I heard a Pastor say this on a podcast the other day, and I want it to be true for you because you have experienced the hard life.

Life hasn’t been fair. I don’t have room here to list the things that made your childhood painful, adolescence cruel, and adulthood agonizing. But you know. You feel it. You lived it.

So the question is can you still have the good life?

I believe so. Because while you had those awful things happen (and you made a few mistakes along the way), those aren’t the only things that define your life.

The good life and the hard life is a little bit like caring for a garden. Weeds and beautiful flowers will both grow up. If you don’t want weeds, you have two options. 1. Don’t plant a garden and just put concrete instead. 2. Work diligently to remove the weeds as they appear.

I think the good life and the hard life both grow in the same soil of love. When you love, you provide the necessary ingredients for beauty, goodness, and light to shine, but

• Where there is beauty there is the potential for ugly,

• Where there is goodness there is the potential for wickedness,

• Where there is light there is the potential for darkness.

It reminds me of the poem commonly called “Anyway,” which was most notably hung on Mother Teresa’s wall, but was written by Dr. Kent Keith who entitled it the “Paradoxical Commandments”

Love,

Aaron