Life Stinks - Here's an Elephant

I found this image on Facebook and I knew I had to share it. It has an interesting and encouraging message, and it gets bonus points for depicting and elephant.

I'm pretty sure that this is a big part of the plan of life. In life, we all start off being weak and foolish. We do a lot of stupid things. We fail at almost everything we try. We get discouraged and frustrated, and at that point, some people blame life itself for being too hard, or blame themselves in a bad way for being hopeless. The wise people, the strong people, or rather, the people who become wise and strong, are basically those that get so fed up with being weak and foolish that they do something about it. They exercise, they keep trying, they ponder their decisions, and they learn. Eventually, they become the kind of people the rest of us look up to and think "If only I were more like them," but they only got to be they way they are by becoming sick and tired of being the way we are now.

I think life is supposed to stink. I think that life is supposed to stink so much that we get sick of how badly it sticks, until we build up enough motivation to do something about it. It starts on the inside. We stink. We experience weakness and foolishness until we get so fed up with being weak and foolish that we decide we'd rather work our butts off to change ourselves than go on being the way we are. So we invest a great deal of time and effort into the hopeless dream of self-improvement until we find, to our surprise, that it's actually working. The more we try and keep trying, the stronger and wiser we become. And that's when we start to stink less, when we decide that we're so sick of the way we are that we're willing to work hard to become better.

Then we branch out. We become so sick of the destruction of the environment, or the suffering in foreign countries, or even the suffering in our own neighborhoods, that we decide that it's worth the effort and the sacrifice to volunteer our time and our money to make the world stink a little less. And if enough people work hard enough to make the world stink less, it's going to stink less and less until it doesn't stink at all. Just like us.

I'm not sure if God made the world stink so we can become more Christlike by trying to make it stink less, or if people made the world stink because people stink. Either way, we've all got a nasty mess to clean up, both inside ourselves and outside. But the more we work to make ourselves and the world around us stink less, the less and less we'll all stink. Until one day, hopefully, neither we nor the world we live in are going to stink at all. I'm looking forward to that. I know that there's a long, hard struggle between this day and that one, but if life stinks enough that it bothers me enough to make me want to do something about it (and I'm beginning to think that it does), I'm going to have all the motivation I need to make myself and the world stink less.