Everybody enjoys a good party. Everyone can remember a time in high school when students in their class threw parties. There were always certain popular kids whose parties everybody wanted to go to. You would get the news of the party and the next couple of days you waited while you wondered if you were one of fortunate people who that popular boy or girl would invite to the party. Everybody wanted to go to that party. There is one type of party though that nobody wants to go to, including God. You shouldn’t invite God to a pity party.
Pity parties are common in everybody’s life. Everyone at some point in time has encountered a time in thier life when everything was going wrong. During those times it is common to focus on those bad things and think “why me?” It is common to think about how bad life is and pretty soon you’re throwing the pity party bash of the year. Of course a party just isn’t a party by yourself, you always have to invite the people around you. When someone receives an invite to your pity party they always dread it. Many people don’t feel like having to be the one to say, “wow, man you’ve really got it rough” when really you’re just going through things that everybody faces in life.
We know that wanting to throw a pity party is common because it even happens in the Bible. In II Kings Elijah decides to have a pity party and the number one guest is God himself but just like everybody else God hates pity parties. God knows we have problems, he knows everything, but when we throw a pity party we lose perspective. When we throw a pity party we focus on everything bad in our life. So how absurd is it that when we have this party to commemorate all the bad things in our life that we invite the one thing in our life that is right?
I remember in high school I used to throw a number of pity parties myself. Most of my friends just rolled their eyes or said something nice and continued on but there was one girl who wasn’t like the rest. This girl was very blatantly honest and told me I was being stupid. She told me I was focusing on the bad stuff when there was plenty of good going on in my life. God is like that friend. Sure God will listen to problems if you have them, he will always listen but once you start to cut the cake for that pity party he’ll tell you that you are wrong. God isn’t going to sugar coat things by telling you everything is going to be okay. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. God will blatantly tell you that life sucks sometimes. God wants us to see the bad times and the bad things in life because it will allow us to better appreciate the one person who can fix everything.
Next time you decide you want to throw a pity party think twice. Tear up those invitations and put away the party hats. When Jesus Christ was being sent to the cross to die for our sins he never threw a pity party so we don’t need to throw one because we lost our job, because a loved one left us or any other reason. God has already taken care of everything.
