that lie about greener grass

I’m re-reading Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, and there a number of worthy excerpts. Paragraphs you just want to skim again, read out loud, chew on.

One segment addresses a common lie I’ve been considering over the past year or two. I know that life is hard and that it often isn’t fair, but I still harbor the very American impulse to believe my life will continually improve in the coming weeks and months. Though the church taught me about “persecution and trials,” I’m not sure I understood that awkward conversations, miscommunication, and stressful projects would be par for the course. Course after course. Cue Peterson:

“We keep expecting things to get better somehow. And when they don’t, we whine like spoiled children who don’t get their way. We accumulate resentment that stores up in anger and erupts in violence. Convinced by the lie that what we are experiencing is unnatural, an exception, we devise ways to escape the influence of what other people do to us by getting away on a vacation as often as we can. When the vacation is over, we get back into the flow of things again, our naïveté renewed that everything is going to work out all right—only to once more be surprised, hurt, bewildered when it doesn’t.”

Okay, so we’re going on vacation (in two days!) for other reasons than to escape annoying people. But Peterson speaks effectively to the greener grass impulse. I need to parse out the difference between discontentedness and genuine hope that God will improve a relationship, provide a financial need, and heal an illness.