Do you ever wonder what life would be like if our hardest battles never existed?  If I’m being completely honest, I do.  More than I care to admit.  There are days that I long for the comfort of another time, the ease of another season, a reprieve from this divine restlessness.

But would I go back?  Would I surrender all that I have and all that I am now for all that I was?

Would I go back to a time when my biggest concern was affording the nicer knobs for my kitchen cabinets.  A time when my biggest insecurities were whether or not my husband liked the dress I bought for his work party, if my in-laws approved of me, or if my girlfriends noticed my new matching throw pillows.  Back to a time when no lives were on the line, no one’s eternity was at stake….or was it??

In One Thousand Gifts, one of my favorite wordsmiths, Ann Voskamp reminds us that, “In an endless cycle of grace, He gives us gifts to serve the world.”

Every moment is a gift designed for eternal purpose. We must use what we’ve been given, or we waste it.   So, no, I wouldn’t go back – Oh, sure, there will be moments when I long for life to be less heavy.  But the thing is, life is heavy.  The weight of everyday can be crushing…or it can be transforming.  The weight of this world can tie us down, or it can be just what we need to learn to soar…and just maybe, to give flight to another.

Because, friends, lives are on the line and eternities are at stake.  Our pastor recently shared a quote by Dave Davidson,

“If you found a cure for cancer, wouldn’t it be inconceivable to hide it from the rest of mankind?  How much more inconceivable to keep silent the cure from eternal death?”  And we know the cure.  The cure for a world, a people being crushed by the weight of their days, their responsibilities, their circumstances, their sin.  If we know Him, we are the cure.

Now this is eternal life; that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.  John 17:3 NIV

This is the cure for an ordinary life; knowing Him. No, we can’t go back.  There’s no one there to go back to.  Who we were is gone.

2 Corinthians 5:16-18 (NLT)  At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view.  How differently we know him now!  This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person.  The old life is gone; a new life has begun.  And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ.  And God has given us this task of reconciling people to Him.

This is it, this is our task, our purpose, our mission.  We are ambassadors of reconciliation.  It doesn’t matter where we’ve been or what in our past had seduced us into a life of anything but taking up our cross.  Whether it’s complacency, lust, bitterness, addiction, comfort…  The past will always knock,  but because we know Him, we know the cure…and we can’t keep silent