“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”
When people talk about classic dystopian fiction, typically two comparable novels come up as examples: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).
Nineteen Eighty-Four (probably the more famous of the two) describes a world in which a totalitarian state run and surveilled by the evil, all-seeing “Big Brother” lies to its citizens and forces them into submission through fear. Brave New World (my personal favorite of the two), on the other hand, depicts a world in which access to pleasure and easy escapes from life’s hardships turn its citizens into apathetic-yet-productive members of an uncaring society.
Brave New World is finally being released as a television show in the next few months, but Nineteen Eighty-Four is likely more famous because of its many movie, TV, and radio adaptations throughout the past few decades. That said, it can be argued that the situations described in Brave New World’s society are more likely to happen in real life.
We, all of humanity as a whole, simply tend to be more willing to accept distractions and escapes such as those in Brave New World than the hardships described in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t know about you, but I would absolutely take a Netflix binge or a trip to Disneyland over spending time thinking about an imminent financial problem or health scare. Obviously it’s easier for us to seek escape or distraction from the hard stuff than face it head-on, but life’s times of trouble will always be there no matter what we distract ourselves with. Luckily, the Bible gives us some encouragement for when life gets hard.
Besides the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), the book of James is probably my favorite passage of Scripture. James gives some of the best practical advice on how to do Christianity and be like Christ while acknowledging that doing so can be difficult at times.
In the first chapter, James tells us that we should consider ourselves fortunate “whenever [not ifever, but whenever] we face trials” because the long-term rewards we receive for doing so are perseverance and maturity. The only way we can fully and perfectly achieve this reward of maturity is not by escaping or distracting ourselves from hardships, but by accepting and embracing them.
Of course sometimes it is appropriate to seek refuge or escape from a toxic or dangerous circumstance, but if we are to follow the Bible’s advice on embracing and learning from what life throws at us, then we will receive the practical rewards that James promises us. It is in embracing and learning from our hardships that we can mature and avoid the uncaring world described in Brave New World.
-Travis Morrill
Communications and Facilities Administrator at Friends Community Church