Category: Complaining

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Short Story: A Blessing on Every Wave

shells

Hannah sat thoughtfully on the shoreline, just close enough to the ocean for the waves to reach her feet, keeping her cool on the hot summer day. As one wave splashed around her, she noticed a beautiful shell left behind. Instinctively, she grabbed the shell and turned it over in her hands. It was beautiful–an amazing tiny gift that had she not noticed might have slipped back out to sea or been trampled underfoot by one of the many people running in and out of the water.

On the next wave, Hannah noticed another shell–a different kind, but equally amazing. Soon, she had to take her hat off to hold all the shells she’d found. These tiny treasures arrived on every ocean wave, yet Hannah realized she’d never noticed or appreciated them before. Looking around her, it seemed no one else was noticing them either. Could these beautiful gifts have become so taken for granted no one even saw them anymore but rather trampled or ignored them?

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Lamentations 3:22-23 (ESV)

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Short Story: Purposefully Hard

Boy school

“Why does it have to be so hard?” Josiah moaned, burying his hand in his head. This particular assignment felt like it was just too much. How was he ever supposed to complete it? He wanted to just give up.

Josiah wished he could find a way to transport himself somewhere else. He wanted to escape this challenge. He saw his brothers outside playing, and wished he could join them. Why was he stuck with this task?

“Do you want to learn?” Josiah’s father’s compassionate voice interrupted his thoughts.

Josiah looked up. “Yes, I do,” he replied. “But why can’t we do the assignments we did last week? They were easy enough.”

“Because if you kept just doing them, you wouldn’t keep learning. I have to make it hard for you to learn.”

“This hard?” asked Josiah.

Josiah’s father looked at him lovingly. “Will you trust me to give you the assignments you need?”

Josiah sighed. He didn’t like this assignment at all, but he knew he could trust his father. It helped knowing that there was a purpose to the hard.

"Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness." James 1:2-3 (ESV)
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Short Story: Distorted Views

window

Ava walked silently through the town, deep in thought. She’d had a hard day—or maybe I should say a hard month or even year. Nothing had gone the way she wanted. She’d sprained her arm—it was wrapped in a splint under her coat, effectively rendering it hard for her to do much at all. Except walk. She was hoping this walk would help clear her head and lift the fog from her heart.

She paused at the first home she passed, stealing a glance in the window as she did. She saw a little boy laughing and a mom pulling a plate of steaming hot cookies out of the oven. The scene looked so warm…so inviting.

There aren’t any cookies back at my house…and I can’t bake them with this arm, Ava thought to herself. She sighed and walked on.

The next home she passed looked strangely like one from her early childhood. Almost exactly like it, actually. She ventured a longer look inside this time and gasped at what she saw. There was a little girl who looked remarkably like she had, playing with her brother and sister, giggling and laughing. The scene brought back a rush of memories of the fun she used to have with her siblings—siblings that had long since grown up and moved out. If only she could go back in time…

“Ava, what are you doing?” The voice came, not from within the house or her head this time, but from next to her. Her friend Ella stood by her side.

“Just remembering,” Ava replied. “This window—it’s like a glimpse into my past.”

“A distorted glimpse,” Ella replied.

“What do you mean?” Ava inquired.

“Did no one warn you about the windows in this town?” Seeing Ava’s silence, Ella hastened to continue. “They’re coated with a special substance that distorts what you see. They only show the good, not any of the hard or the bad. Take this home, for instance. You see a scene that reminds you of happy moments from your childhood. But you don’t see all the times you and your siblings quarreled, or the hard days you had then too. Like the time you broke your back, remember?”

Ava remembered. She’d had to rest for weeks. The past hadn’t always been easy. “I wish my life could be more like that glimpse I saw in the house over there,” she muttered, pointing back to the home with the fresh cookies.

“You mean the distorted glimpse you saw,” Ella corrected. “If we could look through true glass into that home, we’d find it has struggles too. Is that the Jones’s house? I think the husband just lost his job. You can’t escape hardships, Ella. They come in different shapes and sizes, but we all have them.

“But here’s the deal. You can spend the rest of the day pining after distorted pictures through the windows, or you can head back home and see about making some beautiful memories yourself. Just because you can’t move your arm doesn’t mean there aren’t things you can do.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?” Ava asked. She still wasn’t 100% convinced.

“Like lose to me at a game of chess,” Eva replied with a laugh. “You don’t need two hands for that!”

“That’s true,” Ava replied with a laugh that a few minutes ago had felt impossible. She turned around from the town with the distorted windows back to her reality. She was glad she’d made the positive memories she had in her early childhood, and she wanted to go on making beautiful memories today in this new season, with life’s new challenges…and blessings.

Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:19 (ESV)

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Short Story: Only Sunshine?

tomato

It’s raining again, Tommy the tomato plant complained to himself. Why does it always have to rain? I wish we could always have sunshine.

Being just a tomato plant, Tommy didn’t know that the rain is exactly what gave him the water he needed to grow strong and produce plump, melt-in-your-mouth tomatoes. All he thought of is how the wind blew him back and forth and how the rain pelted down on him. He didn’t like it at all.

A few weeks later, Tommy got his wish. There was a drought—a long time with no rain at all. At first, Tommy was very happy. No rain!

But then the soil began to dry up. No problem, Tommy thought. I’ll just dig deeper down into the soil with my roots.

But then that soil, too, became dry.

Tommy no longer had enough moisture to send to all his leaves. They began to wilt. A few began to shrivel up and die. Tommy realized he would soon wither up altogether if it didn’t rain.

He knew now how wrong he had been—he needed rain! The storms gave him something very important he couldn’t live without.

“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Romans 5:3-5 (ESV)
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Short Story: Two Perspectives

Sheep

BaBa and BeBe both had traveled through some tough terrain recently. Their shepherd had led them through a narrow mountain pass, into (and out of) a dark cave, and now they were in a field where wild beasts had roared in the distance.

“It’s been a horrible trip,” BaBa moaned. “Dangers and hardships everywhere. Did you see how I toppled on my back coming down that mountain pass? I’d never traveled such a steep slope.”

“But the shepherd picked you right up,” countered BeBe. “He led us safely every step. We didn’t know where we were going, but he did. And I’m sure he still does.”

“But did you hear that noise last night?” BaBa asked. “I thought for sure a wild animal would tear us apart.”

“I heard it,” replied BeBe, “and I was afraid at first. But then I looked over at the shepherd, and saw he had his weapon at the ready. He’s not going to let anything hurt us, BaBa. I, for one, am going to graze in peace.”

With that, BeBe started munching on a delicious clump of grass. But BaBa was not finished yet.

“Where do you think we’ll go next? What if it’s near a cliff? I’m soooooo scarred I’ll fall over a cliff.”

BeBe felt a momentary panic at the thought of a cliff, but then she remembered her shepherd. “If our shepherd can lead us through the dangers he has, I think we can trust him to keep us safe near a cliff,” she replied, returning to her munching. This pasture had such delicious grass!

BaBa, on the other hand, kept baaing about the distant animal noises she heard and how hard of a path she’d trod. She kept thinking about the hardships instead of the shepherd.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures.

Psalm 23:1-2a (ESV)

RewireKnow someone going through a hard time who could use encouragement to keep their eyes on the Great Shepherd? Check out Rewire: A True Story About Life’s Whys.

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Story: Playing on the Job

hammer

Derick didn’t feel like working that morning. He wanted to be playing.

So instead of working hard, he played around on the job, trying to get everyone’s attention to get them to play too. He tried to get his coworkers to laugh at jokes. He tried to juggle his hammer as if it were a ball. He lined up the nails in a pattern instead of hammering them into the wood.

Derick’s plan to get attention worked, only not the way he expected. His boss came over and said words Derick never wanted to hear: “You’re fired.”

Derick pleaded and said he hadn’t meant any harm, but it was no use. He’d made choices, and those choices had consequences. With a heavy heart, Derick headed to his car. How would he feed his family with no job? How would he make money to go do fun things?

Derick learned a very important lesson that day—one that he wished he had learned long before. There’s a time to work, and a time to play. And when it’s time to work, we need to do it with all our heart, as if God Himself were our boss.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:” Ecclesiastes 3:1 (ESV)

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.” Ecclesiastes 9:10 (ESV)

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Short Story: Hidden Opportunities

Dishes

What a mess, Julia thought as she walked into the kitchen and saw all the dishes. Then she remembered the special computerized glasses her dad had given her and told her to wear.

“They’ll help you see life differently,” he’d told her.

She pulled them out of her pocket and put them on. The words “opportunity to serve” flashed across the screen. Were these dishes really an opportunity for her to serve her family?

Julia blinked back the tears. Her friend’s words stung. Julia felt anger at the injustice rising in her heart. She pulled out her glasses. “Opportunity to love” flashed across the screen. Could her friend’s insensitivity and lies actually be an opportunity for her to grow in love?

For the third time that day, Julia rolled the bandage around her ankle. This sprained ankle had totally ruined all of her plans. She had a tennis practice and a game Saturday—or at least she did before this. The game meant so much to her, but now she wouldn’t be able to go.

Julia moped around the house for a day before she remembered her glasses. When she put them on and looked at her ankle, the words “opportunity to trust” flashed across the screen. Could even this ankle be an opportunity rather than an obstacle?

Little by little, Julia’s glasses changed how she saw the world and how she lived. She discovered that the very things she often complained about were really opportunities in disguise.

“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 (ESV)

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Story: Why Did You Give Me This?

gift

Ryan looked up from the pages of the how-to-code book with a sigh. This was sooooo hard! His eyes wandered out the window to where his brothers were throwing a ball their father had given them. Why couldn’t his father have given him something easy to use too? He was frustrated…and afraid of failing.

“I gave you just what you need.” Ryan’s father’s voice startled him. Ryan had forgotten his father was sitting right there.

“It’s just so hard,” Ryan muttered.

His father smiled. “Of course it is. You know, I never expected you to do it alone. I’m right here and can help you.”

Ryan looked back at the frustrating coding pages. He would try again…this time, with his father’s help.

The book was still tough, but it made such a difference to do it with his father! A  strange thing began to happen. He began to actually enjoy his coding assignment and become thankful his father had given him it. Truly, his father had known what was best!

“Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.” Colossians 3:17 (NASB)

“Whoever speaks, is to do so as one who is speaking the utterances of God; whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies; so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belongs the glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” 1 Peter 4:11 (NASB)