Life has felt pretty steady lately. We’ve had our regular ups and downs as normal,
but no big news or life changing events. For the most part it has been good and we have so much to be thankful for. God has abundantly provided in so
many areas of our lives.
But I know it’s only a season. While I’m not living in fear
of what could go wrong next (trust me I’ve done plenty of that in the past)
I’ve lived long enough and seen enough to know that sooner or later life will
be hard again. Sickness will come. Death of loved ones will take place. And I
will wrestle again with God questioning his goodness when life doesn’t go as
planned.
This past week a little boy from Jack’s school was in an
unexpected accident and passed away a few days later. I visited his parents for
a few minutes while they held on hope for his life at the hospital and vividly
felt the pain they were walking through. I was angry and sad at all of it. And
desperately pleaded with God to spare them from the pain of losing yet another
child. Surely a good God would never allow this to happen, or at least He
should intervene to make it all better.
Yet the answer seemed to be ‘No’ to some very VERY desperate
prayers. From some very hurting people.
How can I teach my children that God is a good and loving
God when such unthinkable things happen? Why would I teach them that Jesus came
to ‘give life and give it abundantly’ (as he professed in John 10:10) when He
would allow such hurt and pain to take place?
I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve had the privilege to see
first hand that God does indeed give life and give it abundantly from the most
broken of places.
For seven years Steve and I attended Celebrate Recovery and
we had the privilege to hear story after story of how God had taken the most
broken of circumstances, and He somehow brought the most beautiful things out
of it. I met countless people who had no hope, no joy, and had walked through
the most unthinkable of circumstances- a child who died to cancer after many
years of fighting for them, abuse of an innocent child, divorce, addiction, etc…
and God over the years wrote the most beautiful stories I had ever heard.
Ministries and purpose that were birthed from the very loss of life. Joy
restored. Hope breathed back into the lives of these people.
Maybe, just maybe, the greater miracle takes place in the
making it through the darkest of valleys without falling apart.
Maybe, God sees the eternal and we can only see the
temporary. And he is working towards life that will last forever, even if it
means going through some very painful circumstances in our earthly life.
Maybe, we can trust God knows what he’s doing even during
times when we can’t understand or make sense of it all.
The truth is I have a hard time reconciling a good God to
all of this. A God that would allow children to be orphans, parents to bury
their children, rape, abuse, genocide, etc. But I will speak this truth to my
children: God can be trusted. He is trustworthy. He is true to his promises. He
is good. And He loved us so much that he found a way to reconcile us to Him so
that we could be in His presence. And it was all His plan and idea… and nothing
that we did on our own.
And I can say all of this with confidence because He has
been all of these things to me.
Most of our friends know about Andrew and the valley we
walked through after losing him. But that hasn’t been the only time Steve and I walked
through valleys, it has only been the most public. There were many other
valleys before and there have been many valleys since- more private of course-
that we wish we would’ve never walked through. And each time God has come
through and restored all that was broken from each one of those.
On the other hand, I’ve never seen restoration or healing
take place without holding on to our faith in Jesus. I’ve also met families who
have fallen apart after a loss, give in to addiction, and gone on to live very
broken lives for the rest of their years. I know it can go the other way to,
and how easy it is to go down that road. The road where we are too
angry to pray, cry out to God for help, and surrender our will to Him.
So I will cling on to hope next time I walk through another
valley. I have no doubt I will wrestle with God and question what He’s up to, and
even feel angry at Him. I will probably hear silence again after some very heartfelt
prayers, and feel abandoned I have felt in the past. But I will
remember that at the end of it all He is always faithful.
For the Lord is good
and his love endures forever; his
faithfulness continues through all generations. Psalm 100:5
If we are faithless,
He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself. 2 Timothy 2:13
For our light and
momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs
them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen, since
what is seen is temporary but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:17-18
On an interesting note, I wrote this post Saturday night,
and our pastor at church spoke on this very same thing this morning. Here’s a
great sermon on why to hold on to God in the midst of injustice and brokenness. It's the sermon from 6/24/18.
http://www.fishhawkfc.org/resources/sermons/
