Overcome the World

“In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” John 16:33

I am what my wife would call “anti-confrontational.” Sounds good, am I right? Anti= against. Confrontational= fighting. I’m against fighting. But when my wife describes me in this fashion, she always has a… tone. An angry tone. An exasperated, “I’m sick of this foolishness”-type tone. One lesson that I’ve learned is that confrontation is a part of life. There will be disagreements. There will be misunderstandings. There will be people who let you down, or take the easy way out, people who sacrifice you for their greater good. And in those situations, a healthy dose of confrontation is in order. Even Jesus flipped some tables once in a while.

Well, I actively avoid those situations. When I get angry, I get flustered. I stutter. I jumble my words together. You ask me to write a strongly worded letter, I’ve got you. You want me dismantle somebody with a deep-cutting Yelp review? Hold my Diet Pepsi. But if you ask me to get into somebody’s face and tear them down for being against my cause? Can’t do it. Even with years of experience in high school education, I still can’t. I never raise my voice. When I get mad, I purposefully slow down. I pointedly slow-talk you menacingly. Even coaching, I raise my voice only with rhetorical purpose. I scream only after I’ve corrected the missed assignment or the poor technique. I yell a lot during pre-game ra-ra speeches, but again: only with rhetorical purpose.

But to confront? Nope; makes my skin crawl.

Now I’m not saying you ever have a right to go full Karen on a 16-year old K.F.C. clerk who screwed up your online mobile order, but oftentimes confrontation can be both unavoidable and… hear me out… healthy. It stops things from building up. It stops a problem and may start a solution. It corrects misunderstandings and stops a problem before it becomes a catastrophe. But it is rarely pretty. And I’m the cowardly lion here dancing around Oz still looking for my courage while telling students, athletes, and my own kids they have to “man-up” or whatever that means, all while my wife (playing the part of Dorothy) shakes her head and laughs at my obvious hypocrisy.

This verse talks about tribulations, a topic that, like confrontation, I openly avoid. And while that seems like a no-brainer, tribulation has defined me, made me the man I am. I likewise see this in my wife, Anna, who has been torn down and rebuilt by tribulation. It stinks, but at this point in our lives, I like to think that Anna and I have a mutual partnership that has grown, matured, and thrived based on overcoming these tribulations. While it is always hard to look on our hardships and be thankful for them, we understand that we are who we are because of the struggles we’ve overcome. And now we overcome those things together.

We both grew up with poverty, though we didn’t know any better at the time. We both had families that worked doggedly hard for what little they had, families who tried extremely hard to live that 90’s-era suburban American dream, but there were definitely sacrifices that needed to be made. We were both from families of divorce, Anna from a very early age. Balancing that broken household lifestyle while trying to normalize the situation was agonizing at times.

One thing that we both had, and I will speak more for myself here than I will my wife: we had love. My mom was named Terry. She was a troubled soul, no doubt. She had a number of troubling vices that plagued her for the bulk of her life. She was a product of a myriad of terrible choices, a walking cautionary tale, at times. But she had one quality that can never and will never be discounted: she loved her children. My sister and I, Terry loved us so much that she didn’t have the words to say. I have never, not for one second of my existence, doubted that my mother loved me. I have doubted many things, but never that. She may have made questionable decisions and terrible judgement calls, but she sacrificed for me and my sister. She took pride in our accomplishments. She was there for us, supported us, took the fall for us many times. Love does make up for a lot of shortcomings; while we lived in the occasional squander, I never knew it. There are a lot of kids I knew that were financially far more blessed than I was, but they didn’t feel the love that Terry gave to my sister and I every day.

For that, I was rich.

The greatest thing my mother ever did for me was marry into the Snuggs family. She met a man, Hal, who was a great man who did many great things for me, but he wasn’t in my life long. Lung cancer took him away from us just a few years into our lives together, but his family took us in for the long haul. Harold and Bettie Snuggs, the most interesting two people I have ever met in my life, took us in and loved us. Their son had passed well before his time, and for a multitude of reasons, they had no obligation to us. Yet they kept us. I don’t know whether they saw something in me, or in my mother and sister, or whether it was out of respect and memory to Hal, but they made us part of their family long after Hal went to the Savior.

And with that, they gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received: they introduced me to Jesus Christ. Grandpa Snuggs told me many times he thought I was a lost cause. I was this introverted emo kid who stayed locked in his darkened room listening to music and reading comic books and that’s it. He forcibly drug me out of that room, forced me to socialize. He made me talk, he made me sit through boring adult meetings and conversations. And most important of all, he dragged my butt to church. He threw me in the van and carted me there, for Boy Scouts, youth services, and for Sunday morning worship. My personal testimony is an easy one: a crotchety old man forced me, kicking and screaming, to church every week until I finally realized what all the fuss was about.

Jesus Christ taught me many things: He taught me that love is sacrifice. He taught me what it means to be a man. He taught me how to love and be loved. And in all that, He finally showed me all the amazing things my mother did for me. She couldn’t manage money, or marriages, it seemed. But she could love the absolute heck out of me. And she did. I know what love is; through Jesus Christ and through Him alone, I know what love is, what it looks like, how it feels. Because of Jesus Christ, I know that Terry, Mom, loved me absolutely and completely. Did we go through some tough times? Absolutely. But I felt the love of Jesus Christ through my mom. Through Grandma and Grandpa Snuggs. And that love made me stronger. Far stronger than tribulations.

“I have overcome the world.” This was from Jesus, and it was the baller-est of baller moves. Yeah you have, Jesus. And it’s a reminder that nothing is bigger than Him, no matter how difficult it seems. But let me throw some clichés at you: you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Something about skyscrapers, I dunno. The ultimate truth is that nothing worth having will come easy, and tribulations will happen. They should happen. Some of the greatest sports heroes achieve greatness on a big stage through serious adversity, and they are immortalized as a result. Remember Jordan and the flu game? Google it; it’s amazing.

One day, if I am ever deemed important enough to deserve one, I’ll write my autobiography. No doubt, upon writing it, I will be aghast at the circumstances I’ve had to overcome to get to where I am now. Poverty. Vice. Sin. A great many things that I’m not ready to make public knowledge but will someday come to light. But throughout, a few certainties have made every gratuitous circumstance endurable. For one, I have always been loved. My blessed saint of a mother always loved me. Hal, in the short time he was in my life, loved me. Grandpa and Grandma Snuggs, supremely loved me. Love will carry you a long way.

But this verse? It says it all. When love wasn’t enough to get me through the hard times, I needed Jesus Christ. I needed the assurance that if I failed, I would still be redeemed. And to know… not just to feel… to KNOW that nothing is too big for Jesus to overcome. To KNOW that the God in my corner is the strongest, most powerful, most unbreakable, most omnipotent, one and only true God… and that He’s actually in my corner… there’s nothing I can’t overcome. The size and strength of the problem, the tribulation, is meaningless. I can do everything, OVERCOME anything, through Jesus Christ Who is my strength. Why?

Because He’s overcome the world.