Core Value #5 in our company is Winning. The theme Bible passage for that core value comes from Jeremiah 29:11 where God said to his people “I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future.” I taught this core value in our team training last week, waxing eloquently about why winning was important, about why God’s design for us to win, and about attitudes and attributes of winners. My team bought it hook, line & sinker.

Unbeknownst to me, the day before friends of mine had lost their son-in-law to a car accident. He died leaving a young wife, and two primary school aged children. Today the mother-in-law posted to Facebook that the last two days (which included the funeral) had been the hardest of her life.

Plans to prosper you………not to harm………hope…….a future.

So where is the prosperity, the hope, the future in this? Where’s the God who wants us to win that I taught about last week? I’ve been struggling with that thought. My guess is that its hard to offer praise to God in a household that has experienced such loss, I get that. How can we maintain our faith and reconcile the death of this Daddy with a God who says he wants to prosper us, give us a hope and a future. This is hard math. I just can’t make it add up.

I remember Job had everything taken from him, and he said “Yet if God slays me, I will still trust him.” Nice poetry. But none of us want to have to do it.

Understanding why this young man died is beyond my grasp. But I do remember hearing Babbie Mason sing once at our church in Columbia that “God is too wise to be mistaken. God is too good to be unkind. So when you don’t understand, when you don’t see His plan, when you can’t trace His hand, trust His heart.” His heart is pointed toward us, toward that young widow, her children and even the young man that was taken from them.

I believe that.

We who trust Him do so because we know Him. We know His character. We know His voice. We know His deeds. We know what He says about His desire and intent for us. That’s enough to allow us to continue trusting Him when nothing makes sense. We’ve read the end of the story. And it allows us to say with Job “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.”

“Our inability to deal with unpleasantness in life all goes back to the invention of the flush toilet.” That was the thesis of a great book entitled The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, a Milford, MI funeral director. Lynch notes that in the old days when people died, their family took care of preparing the body at home, and that the unpleasantness of death was buffered by preparing the  loved one’s body for burial. Life included death. 

With the advent of the flush toilet, came a shift in the human psyche, Lynch posits. The flush toilet got rid of life’s unpleasantness with the push of a lever, and thus began the softening of our ability to deal with the many unpleasantries that are part and parcel to the human experience.

People laugh, or look at me weirdly when I tell that story. However, I think Lynch is on to something. I grew up around a funeral home; drawn their by a young lass with whom I was smitten. My first kiss came on the doorstep of a funeral home. Didn’t seem weird to me. She was very much alive! Through the years I occasionally helped to move a body or to deliver the daily dead to another town. I remember when the congressman I’d grown up hearing about as a hometown hero came home in a casket. We opened it and found that when they prepared bodies in Washington D.C. they posed them with their heads turned to face out of the casket. I remember watching as Gary (the funeral director and father of the lass) grabbed the congressman’s head and proceeded to turn his neck until he was facing the direction that dead people were supposed to face in our little town.

I grew up on the farm, and value the lessons I learned there greatly. Death, life, sex, hard-work, economics, it was all there on the farm. It created in me a “rootedness” and a sense of “balance” and understanding of the rhythms of life that I value greatly and am attempting to pass on to my kids through the same farm experiences. But my learning didn’t end on the farm, and it extended past the funeral home. I remember being a Medical Explorer at Cox Hospital when I was 16 years old. Suddenly I was thrust into the delivery room with wailing mommas seeing things I’d never seen before. I remember standing by the bedside of an elderly woman as she took her last breathe. All of these things mixed into the milieu that was my growing up and that have served me well as a pastor, an advisor and counselor, a teacher, a Dad and friend.

So, why do I bring this all up? Unpleasantness, that’s why. In soft America we’ll go far to avoid unpleasantness. We lie and don’t tell the truth to each other because it’s more comfortable to tell the lie than to risk the outburst that the truth might elicit. We tolerate underperformance from our peers and disobedience from our kids because we value faux peace over the clarity and accomplishment that truth and discipline would produce. We don’t fight for truth, because the fight is unpleasant. Case in point: I heard a guy from Minneapolis today on CNN talking about how wars can’t be won, so we shouldn’t fight them because the costs are so high. Hmmm. Let’s think about that a moment. If we used his logic we’d still pay allegiance to the King of England, Obama would likely be a slave instead of the President, and all of Europe would be under control of Hitler’s offspring. Detestable as it is, I think there’s a place and a time for the unpleasantness of war. And confrontation. And moral absolutes.

My house has seven flush toilets. I wouldn’t take for my indoor plumbing. I’m infinitely glad there’s no chamber pot under our bed. But I’m not afraid of unpleasantness. When I know it is lurking, I seek it out so that it can be resolved.

Embrace the unpleasantness. Make the best of it. Learn to deal with it. If you need help, take a look in the toilet. But don’t forget to flush.

I’m not one who believes there is anything noble about struggling. But most of us will find ourselves in struggle from time to time, a struggle with a decision, a struggle with pain, a struggle with personal difficulty, or even a struggle with loss. As I stood in the barn one morning this week and watched a new baby goat struggle to get onto his feet for the first time I was reminded of this story which, as I recall came from Zig Ziglar.

As the story goes, Uncle Bernie grew up on a farm in Canada. When he was four years old his dad woke him up at 3:00 in the morning. “Cup” his dad said, “get up. We have to go down to the barn.” Cup was his father’s nickname for Uncle Bernie. In German it means “the head” and in his family it was his father’s way of calling Bernie “The Smart One”.

When they got to the barn a mare was giving birth to a foal. “Cup, what do you see?” his father asked.

“I see a momma horse having a baby,” Bernie replied. The mare was in trouble and his father had to reach in and turn the foal.

“Cup, what do you see?” his father asked.

“I see a baby horse coming out.”

“Cup what do you see?” he asked again.

“I see a baby horse shivering on the straw.”

“Cup, what do you see now?” his father asked.

“I see the baby horse trying to stand up and the momma horse licking it.”

“Cup, what do you see?” his father continued to prod.

“I see the baby horse struggling to stay on its feet.”

“Cup, what do you see now?” he asked.

“I see the baby horse standing on weak legs and the mother nuzzling it.”

“Cup, what does it mean?” he asked.

“Daddy, I don’t know.”

“Cup, it means that where there is struggle there is life,” he answered.

Where there is struggle, there is life.

Sometimes I face struggles that seem insurmountable, or maybe they can be overcome, but I’m just too tired and weak to face them. It is then that this story motivates me.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Born a blue baby, I survived when not everybody did. Nearly five decades later I’m still on the right side of the grass. Not everybody is. In the midst of a difficult economy, my business survives.

Dead men don’t struggle. I’M ALIVE!

Today you are going to walk into a world full of struggling people. Their issues and problems are enormous. Their challenges are insurmountable. It’s your job as a leader to help them see their struggle in a different way, to realize the opportunity it presents, and to cause them to be grateful—not for the struggle—but that they are still able to struggle. In so doing you change their attitudes. They think differently. They come to life.

Make a difference today!