Happily Ever After?...

So yesterday I posted a quote on my facebook that read, "Lindsey thinks life is a lot easier when you DON'T believe in Happily Ever After...who feeds us this lie anyways!!!
I had a great friend write back and ask "What about the Gospel?"
What a great question, and one worth me sifting through my thoughts on this.
I don't want to blaspheme here, so please don't take this as the Gospel. My view on this may be different than yours just because of what I've been through in life and where I am right now and the reality that I live in...
My thoughts are that "Happily Ever After" only comes in the after of life. I think so often, starting at a very young age, we, girls especially are fed lies that in this life we can find love, fulfillment, or happiness, and that we will experience that happily ever after dream. I've lately made it an objective to unravel the deception of where I truly live. Denial of reality is a huge problem in our lives. I've accepted the reality of the broken sinful world that I live in and the effects that it will forever have on my life in this world.
I am currently reading Broken Down House by: Paul David Tripp, and am constantly reminded that I fall for this lie way too often. The lie that happiness is attainable here... that we will live happily ever after. And honestly believing this lie as a Christian can be even more damaging than a non-believer. One reason being that this is a lie that God never promised. So when life does not hand us our happily ever after on a silver platter (I'll speak for myself), I turn to God and question, why don't you want me to be happy? Why is my life not working out the way I want? Are you punishing me? This lie is outright deception, and it started in the Garden...spoken from the lips of a serpent, named Satan, who slyly put ideas in Eve's mind of more and better, making her question God's motives and goodness and offering false deity to her.
This is one truth we should not deceive ourselves of... this world is sinfully broken, I am sinfully broken, God never promised me happiness here in this world. He promised that He would be here always with me, that He would redeem me and carry me through the crappiness that can come from life as sin taints every corner of this universe, messes up our good intentions, breaks down good things, makes relationships messy, inflicts hurts and disappointments, creates frustrations, teases us with the deception of autonomous control, and makes happiness here unattainable.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think there are times in life when God, the giver of all good gifts, gives us brief glimpses of happiness from eternity like the sun bursting through thick clouds on a dark dreary day. Joy from the Lord pops into our lives in spontaneous spurts giving us hope, picking up our chins and focusing us once again not on the darkness around us, but on what He's at work doing and on Him who is returning one day.
But for me, and what I have lived and seen so far, I refuse to let myself be deceived again by the lie that this life and things in this life can give me the happiness of Eden that I was created for. Maybe that is a glass half empty view, but Christ had to walk a long life of hardship, suffering, brutality, all the way to the Cross, all for me and my sins... how is that happy? The only happiness I see is His victory over the grave, the redemption of my soul, but it came through His death. How horrific that the Son of God had to die the worst death imaginable and carry my wrath from God and separation from His Father to save me from the sin that entagles every fiber of my being.
So what has brought me to accepting the reality of this broken sinful world and not the happily ever after deception?... God's grace opening my eyes to the reality of:
- watching and living in the nuclear fallout of child abuse
- seeing sin steal love and safety from families
- watching children starve to death in the Philippines
- watching innocent girls sold into sex slavery
- living amongst unbearable poverty
- feeling my sinfulness and the damage it has done to others
- my inability to stop putting God's glory on something else in His creation
- being the most productive idol making factory around
- death leaving behind loved ones in it's wake
- hurting friends who are separated from spouses because of war
- war to begin with
- aftermath of messy relationships
- sinful autonomous rebellion boiling up in me before the face of my Creator
- relationships taking the place and glory of God
- watching lost friends flounder in the grief of life without the hope of Christ
- sinners seeking anything and everything to satisfy our emptiness, outside of God
- Christian parents helplessly watching children wander from the Lord
- wonderful godly mothers straining under the "curse" of child rearing because of the fall
- helplessness that comes from not being in control
- living the frustration of being created for perfection and living in a perfect relationship with Christ and not being able to attain either because of this sinful world I live in and my own self centered idolatrous desire to sinfully live for myself...
ALL of this reality that stares me in the face daily breaks down the deceptive lie and leaves me longing for heaven more and more, and not just for the happy that comes after, but for all Truth to be tangible redeemed reality instead of having to fight against this sinful broken reality that we live in. To be in the presence of my Redeemer and Savior Jesus Christ. That in itself will be the happily ever after life... but until then, in this sinful broken warm up act, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on my soul and please continue Your work to redeem my sinful heart!