It's easy to be philosophical about the hardships in life when you aren't going through them. Or when people are distant enough from you that they can't peek into your life to identify them, then you can go on pretending that you have it all together.
It's easy to give platitudes about how God builds patience in us by letting us go through trials, but when you are the one who is going through the trial it's cold comfort.
When you hit that wall where your philosophy and your intellectual agreements run out of words and you're at the end of your own resources... what do you do?
Most of us really just want to be comfortable again. We want the hard time to stop, the pain to go away, the tax refund to come, healing from sickness. We want deliverance from death, deliverance from pain, deliverance from all our discomforts.
It's humanly very hard to reconcile a God who cares about me intimately, loves me passionately and sacrificially with the one who really is seemingly more interested in the state of my spirit than he is with my body or my circumstances. We fall into the "if He loves me he'll take care of me" mode of thinking that equates good things with His favor.
I want to look at that a moment, I'll get back to my original train of thought, but follow me down this bunny trail a while. When we want to train a dog we do it with reward and punishment. When we want to train our children we do the same thing. It's how we were raised and it's how the world works.
The thing is, while God uses an element of that, call it a function by design, He then calls us to rise above our worldly training and into something different, something we can't see with our eyes, hold in our hands or prove beyond our own personal experience. Something that requires a faith in the things that make no worldly sense and force us to rely completely on Him.
And that is the purpose of our trials and discomforts. To shake us from our worldly training of believing what we see, trusting only in what we can touch or store and having faith in ourselves. Because we think we can control it that way.
I'm going through the bible in a year. This week I'm reading about Job. He didn't earn or deserve the rotten things unleashed on him. He was the apparent victim of God's approving attention. God was bragging on him to Satan, and Satan set out to use Job as a failure in order to hurt God. Job's friends came along and did the very same thing we want for ourselves, someone or something to be responsible for our pain. Something we can point to in a balance sheet to explain or justify our loss, an explanation to the discomfort.
His friends sat with him for a while saying nothing... just entering into that painful space of empathy, grieving with him. But they couldn't sustain it. It had to have gotten them thinking about their own lives, or how they would respond if such devastation had happened to them. And they each gave advice according to their natures.
Let's come back to what I was saying before, the trap we all fall into: "If God loves me he will take care of me". What does it do to our faith, our trust in Him, when the terrible things happen? What if they continue to happen for a very long time? What do we do when we come to the end of our own resources and there is nothing left in the bank and we can't keep up with the payments? When it's time to have that scary surgery?
Take a break from my words for a moment. Think on it. Answer the question for yourself, out loud to God. You have your own situation or circumstance that is represented by your own messy life. Insert that Tough Thing you can't get over, under around or through. What then?
The platitudes don't help do they? They sound distant and make you feel like you are separated from everyone else who is singing the praises of a personal God who cares about them and attributes His love to their well-being as though they are special and God loves them more than he loves you.
That, my friend, is a lonely place to sit. You wonder what you did wrong, and it erodes the foundation of your faith so that you don't trust your full weight to the God who might let you fall. After all, He let Jesus be crucified, Paul be stoned, and Job lost everything but his life so that he could be around to endure the agony of it. We give his wife a hard time for telling him to curse God and die, but she loved Job more than any other and endured the losses along side him. The Psalms are full of verses lamenting the messiness of life and not wanting to live through the agony of it. (My personal favorite is Psalm 13.) She, like us, just wanted the agony to stop. Where do you think her faith was? Not so far distant from where mine is most days.
Is that where you are today? Have you come to the end of your own resources? Do you long for the agony to stop? Do you wonder how long you will have to endure it?
The platitudes seem so distant, they can't reach inside the pain to where the hurt is. The anger that we hold, the belief that someone is responsible for what we are going through or worse, the belief that God COULD have saved us from this - and just chose not to, makes us hard inside. Firms our resolve not to trust anyone else, especially a God who doesn't come through for us.
Did you catch that? Did you see past the feelings of disappointment and hurt in that statement to the revelation on where trust is seated? Has He not come through for you? Do you pray to God to fulfill your own agenda, your will?
Which one of us is God?
This is why we are not exempt from hard times as a Christian. Because those hard times reveal where our foundations are, what we really want and what we are really trusting in.
It's a mistake to think that once we are saved our world view changes over night. It doesn't. It's revealed in these hard, and lonely places of our lives where we get stuck. The changes in our world view happen when we release our own agendas and desires of our heart, and cling instead to the things we can't see or touch. Read the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5-7 to understand the differences between the way God sees things working and the way the world does.
Today, I am looking at my own life. The hard places I sit at, wishing it were different. Can I endure? Will I let these hard times, these hard places reveal the fractures in my thinking, the head games I've played with myself to justify my own desires and agendas?
I'm not good at it. I fail all the time. I sit long at those walls, crying because I am once again focused on blame, fault, worry and the oft repeated question... "Why?"
Lord please give me the courage to endure. Help me to cling to you, who you really are and not what I think you will do for me. Thank you, Lord, for not leaving me there at the wall.
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