This week's wisdom comes to us from the late M. Scott Peck, psychiatrist, writer and troubled soul.

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. One we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. The voice their belief, noisily, or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?

[…]

What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one. Problems, depending upon their nature, evoke in us frustration or grief or sadness or loneliness or guilt or regret or anger or rear or anxiety or anguish or despair. These are uncomfortable feelings, often very uncomfortable, often as painful as any find of physical pain, sometimes equaling the very worst kind of physical pain. Indeed, it is because of the pain that events or conflicts engender in us all that we call them problems And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy. – M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, pp. 15, 16.

When Dr. Peck wrote The Road Less Traveled he was not a Christian. But I share his words here because it was the research for this book that led him to faith in Jesus Christ. (After his conversion Dr. Peck wrote what I believe is a fine little book on human evil called People of the Lie.)

I also share this because Dr. Peck is right. Once we truly accept it that life is difficult, in a lot of ways, it really does cease to be difficult!

I share this also because one group which does a lot of moaning in this country is the group which ought to know why life is difficult. And because they know, they really ought to be the quietest when it comes to life’s difficulties; I mean Christians of course. Christians of all people should expect life to be difficult -- and surprised when it isn't. Why?

Because there once was a tree in the middle of a garden. Sadly, one day a bit of the fruit of that tree was desired, and plucked and eaten. Life has been difficult ever since, a struggling garden, by the sweat of a brow, always on the verge of death and always filled with thistles and thorns needing removed.

But there’s another tree, a tree of life, watered and nourished with the blood of a spotless and blemish-free Lamb.

For now, Christians, life is difficult. Stop your bitching and deal with it. If you won't, then why should anyone else?