“How is that working out for you?” People often ask this sarcastically when the obvious answer should be, “Not too well.”  It is an invitation to reconsider and perhaps to try something else.

But sometimes the answer is, “Just great!”

We’ve all heard the old saw: “Your current program is perfectly designed to deliver the results you are getting.”  That’s good news if you are very happy with your “results,” the life you are experiencing. There is no need to look for anything else. Your program is perfect!  Just keep doing what you are doing.

But nothing is static. Even if you change nothing on your side of the equation, the world around you is changing, more rapidly than ever. What worked well today is unlikely to deliver the same results next year.

Was there a season in your life when your wardrobe was perfectly in style? If you are still wearing the same clothes now (and they still fit!), they may be lovely, they may be “classic”, but they are not in style. What would it take to stay in style? At some point even “classic” threads become a “costume”.

Sometimes we just don’t know how something is working out for us. The feedback loops are too long or confusing, as when the gains (or pleasures) are immediate, though temporary, while the losses (or pains) are hidden, though lasting. This is far more the rule than the exception.

Christendom has been sustained by belief in the long-term (eternal) benefits of living the Christian life. These are so great as to outweigh short-term losses. “For the joy set before him” (long-term), Jesus endured the (short-term) agony of the cross.

In this week’s Epistle lesson St. Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18). If someone were to ask him: “How’s that Christ-follower thing working out for you?” I think he would honestly say, “Painful at times, in the short-run, but glorious in the long-run. And strangely there is something glorious about that even now.”

How we can expect people today to follow Christ, captive as we are in the pursuit of short-term gains and pleasures and immersed in a rapidly changing, fickle, ruthless world? How, especially if His followers are just as caught up in the sad madness as everyone else? Do we have a viable alternative, a counter-culture, that makes Romans 8:18 plausible and even attractive?