I am done on this side

Over the past year my life has taken a dramatic turn for the inactive. I once was an avid reader with a constant stack of books on my bedside table, but now only medicine bottles litter the oaken surface. As I have deteriorated into inactivity I have lost many assets that I once possessed, most importantly that ability to read. I have increased my book load in the past month from no-books to ten... it will indeed be a long and tedious effort to exercise my brain to the place where it will read like it once did.

In 2009 a film entitled (500) Days of Summer was released. The film tells the tale of a failed architect who is working at a greeting card company designing cards. Summer is the name of the girl he falls in love with, who dumps him long before the film is over. He takes this difficultly and falls into a deep depression. He quits his job and stops leaving his apartment. After a long trial of darkness he begins drawing again and starts working on architecture. By the end of the film he has many interviews with different architectural businesses. If not for the fact he had been dropped to the curb by the girl and gone into a deep depression he would not have attempted to become an architect.

This is a world of complacency, we can only get jobs that pay minimum wage and when we get sick we most often decide that it is just the way that it is. There is a powerful scene in The Passion of Christ, when Christ is being scourged and has been beaten to the ground, he looks upon the face of his persecutors and feels only compassion, and in realization of his purpose of forgiveness he stands erect that they may beat him more. We are not called to be complacent but to constantly strive for something better; to fulfill God's will as perfectly as we can.

A great saint, a man of great courage and fortitude, was being burned on a grill and had only one simple remark to make to his murderers as he lay there: "Turn me over, I am done on this side." I believe this is the attitude we should all have when faced with great stress, with great pain, or great persecution, "...I am done on this side." When things become difficult we should only hope that we are strong enough to accept whatever else will come down upon us and strive to overcome the difficulty and be more than it could ever be... so that we can attain that which awaits us at the end.