Endurance

As I've been reading my Bible lately I've noticed that the Bible talks a lot about endurance. I don't know how I keep stumbling upon passages that talk about endurance but I love how God continues to smack you in the face with something even when you don't pick up on it right away. I've been told a couple times I need to keep enduring during this fight against cancer but I don't really know what it means to endure. Sometimes I think just being on earth is difficult, it doesn't even matter what kind of battle a person is fighting; whether it's depression, anger, addiction, or plain old apathy -- every morning we have the choice between pulling the covers over our heads or getting out of bed once again and choosing to endure. 

One of the frustrating things about endurance is that it always involves hardship and trials. Just today my friend and I were talking about how much nicer it would be if God would sit us down on a comfy couch and hand us a cup of tea and a good book and tell us that we were to patiently wait there while endurance "happened" to us. Unfortunately it doesn't work like this, endurance isn't an action that happens to us as we passively wait for it to be over, it's an action we must take part in ourselves -- and do so fully in order to persevere. Furthermore, endurance isn't always easy. Some days it feels like a slight incline, where tomorrow you'll know you'll have a soreness in your thighs but at the same time you know it will make you stronger; other times it feels like you're walking against a crowd of sasquatches and you can't even see what or where your destination is. Even Batman in "The Dark Knight" found out that it was difficult to endure when he asked Alfred what he should do and Alfred responded, "Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They'll hate you for it, but that's the point of Batman, he can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make, the right choice." However, Batman's response was "Well today I found out what Batman can't do. He can't endure this. Today you get to say 'I told you so.'" And if enduring is hard for Batman, what chance do the rest of us have? It isn't always easy, it's rarely enjoyable, and it will never end; yet, we're told to endure. 

Over and over again the Bible states and restates that God's love endures forever (1 & 2 Chronicles and psalms); that his righteousness, faithfulness, dominion and name endure forever (psalms);  and that whatever he does will endure forever (Ecclesiastes 3:14). God makes it look like it's one of his past times to endure, as if he liked playing hockey (because He'd obviously be Canadian), drinking looseleaf tea, and enduring. Furthermore, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul wrote that through God's strength, we get to have enduring qualities too -- we get to take part in this strength that endures the unendurable (Colossians 1:11 MSG), and the reason why we get to experience this strength is because our hope is in something stronger than Batman; our hope is in Jesus. His enduring qualities give us the strength to endure in our own lives.