I Learned This From Eric Ludy

Be A Cheerio

Life is anything but predictable. James is spot on when he reprimands those folks who are so confident in their future that they have every bit of it planned out down to their trade earnings. Their cocksure trust in their own plans is fruitless.

Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit'— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'

James 4:13-15

The question is not whether we will face circumstances that come out of left field. That is certain. The question that remains is how we will respond. The degree of the trial will vary greatly. The opportunity to respond is present every time. The Christian faces each trial with a robust conviction in the goodness and sovereignty of God. The Christian behaves, in the words of Pastor Eric Ludy, like a Cheerio.

Eric is nothing if not a joyful man who knows God. I have watched him endure a basketful of trials for the thirteen years that I have known him, ranging in scope from having me at his discipleship school for more than a year to enduring public slander aimed at him and his wife. In those times, I have observed a man who continually chooses to place his life's lemons in God's hands and rejoice in all circumstances. He taught me that in word and in practice. But what is the deal with Cheerios, you may ask? For a more thorough treatment, listen to this.

But in a nutshell, Cheerios are relentlessly cheery. No matter how many times you press them down into the milk in your breakfast bowl, when you release them, they come bobbing back to the surface reporting for duty. You can never keep a good Cheerio down.

If this is true of Cheerios, how much more should it be the testament about Christians? We have the light of truth, the unbeatable hope that what occurs will only be for His glory and our good. What can possibly keep us down? The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5).

Our existence here is not all rainbows and bowls of breakfast cereal. Serious trials await us. If you are reading this, you have most likely already faced something you never dreamed you would. Grief, betrayal, or a myriad of other pains can smack you upside the head like an unexpected wave. You have no control over when that happens. But the way you react demonstrates something about you. You can sink down into the depths or you can rise to the top of the bowl, like a Cheerio. Eric Ludy taught me that.

The Cheerio Option is not one that we can just pull up our bootstraps and pursue. The supernatural life of Christ is a prerequisite. It is only when He resides in a person that that buoyancy becomes available to them. No matter what comes their way, joy in Christ and His work and what He has given propels them back up.

The pain of those trials is still there. Some of them are enormous, and only God is able to bear that weight. But God's people can know that one-of-a-kind experience of facing something more excruciating than they imagined and still mounting up on eagle's wings.

This will draw the attention of a watching world. Joyous sufferers are in short supply (kind of like seeing a snow leopard in the wild). People will stop to observe and what they will see is the fragrance of Christ. He endured the most unjust and agonizing suffering of all more patiently than anyone. He is our Captain, and we follow Him into the breach. We have as Chesterton masterfully wrote, "a God who knows His way out of the grave".

You cannot trade away your trials. In your life, you will wish you had the trials of some rather than your own and praise God that He has not entrusted you with the trials of others. In the ones that He has given you, pray for the strength to rise up and worship Christ. Pray that as you are pressed, the aroma of Christ would waft up to a lost world. And in a world where you can be so many things, be a Cheerio.