Bright Spot: Your faith can bring you life you've always wanted

Mabel has lived 25 years in a state-run institution for those with low or no income. Her roommates scream, they do not talk intelligibly, and they cannot control their bladder or bowels. Mabel is 89, wears a big hearing aid, is blind, and has a cancer that has partially eaten her face so that she drools constantly.

Yet Mabel is grateful.

Her heart is full of gratitude, and her attitude is full of grace. When asked what she thought about all day there in her dark, nearly soundless, world with the stench of death and disease all around her, she answered: "I think about my Jesus, and how good He's been to me." And then she broke into a  barely understandable hymn she had memorized a long time ago:

"Jesus is all the world to me, my life, my joy, my all.

He gives me strength from day to day, without Him I would fall.

When I am sad, to Him I go; no other one can cheer me so.

When I am sad, He makes me glad, He's my friend."

Are you reaching for a tissue? Feeling guilty for whining over trivial things? You’d have to have ice water running through your veins to be unmoved by Mabel’s story.

How often are we privileged to see this kind of spiritual power and contentment? Were Billy Graham or Mother Theresa filled with any more grace, gratitude and joy from Jesus than Mabel? She not only witnesses to her Lord, but walks as He walked: "To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. … Jesus, full of grace...full of joy through the Holy Spirit.” (I Peter 2:21; John 1:14, 17; Luke 10:21)

Mabel grasped the reality and comfort from some farewell words of Jesus: "In this world you may have trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world!" (John 16:33)

How can we, not just quote those words, but experience them?

Maybe we need to look for real joy, contentment and the abundant life in the right places. Those grieving graveyard visitors looking for their Lord that first Easter morning were challenged by the angels watching Christ’s tomb: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen!” (Luke 24:1-6)

So many of us today are like them, looking for life in all the wrong places; looking for life in “dead” things. We think we’ll get our life back by the lifting of the darkness of depression, or getting a better diagnosis, or being able to visit this place or that person, or just eat our favorite food. “Let my team win March Madness!” we shout.

Those all lead to dead ends, not real life as Jesus promised: “I came that you may have life, life more abundantly.” (John10:10)

So many places where we seek real life over-promise, but under-deliver the kind of life that’s real and rewarding.

Try looking for real life in the same place Mabel did – in gratitude and in Jesus – instead of the “graveyards” where you’ve been looking.

Rick Sams is pastor emeritus of Alliance Friends Church.

This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Bright Spot: Your faith can bring you life you've always wanted