On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

by Alan Noble

If you take away one truth, the one thing in this book I know with certainty, let it be this: your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway.

So, remember this: tremendous suffering is the normal experience of being in this world. Beauty and love and joy are normal, too, but so is suffering.

It’s the way these sins make sin more plausible for others. When others face similar choices in life, our example will affect their imagination and how they respond. We almost never take the witness of our actions seriously enough. I suspect that’s because if we did, it would frighten us. It’s scary to realize that my every decision communicates to people around me something about the nature of God, the goodness of His creation and laws. It means that my sin is never containable. It’s never something I can “make right.” The effects of my actions ripple throughout time and space, drawing in more and more people, for good and for ill. While God’s grace is sufficient for our sins, we do well to recognize the consequences of our sins.

The Judge of all has declared His creation—of which you are no small part, no mistake, and no error—to be good. There is no countermanding that declaration. We can choose to accept that our lives are objectively good before God, or we can deny it. We can assent to God’s act of creation and preservation, or we can vainly rebel against it. But when we choose to affirm what God has already done in creating us, what God is already doing in granting us breath and in preserving His world and us in it, we worship Him.