My life hasn’t always been roses
and sunshine. My guess is yours hasn’t
either. The first time I realized life
was going to include some valleys was the day my parents told me they were
getting a divorce. My mind flooded with visions
of holidays spent split between parents and the realization that my own
children would have more grandparents than their friends. Strange thoughts for a 12 year old, and I
wasn’t quite sure how to deal with them. I begged God to keep my family intact and when
He didn’t, I believed it was because He didn’t like me or care about my life.
I was never specifically taught
that God would protect me from pain, but somewhere along the way I began
believing that if God cared, He wouldn’t let me go through hardship. It is often unstated, and vehemently denied by
Christians, but when trials come, our reaction speaks volumes about what we
believe about God. We seem to think
God’s blessing is measured by how much stuff we have, our bank account balance,
the zip code we live in, and our number of Facebook friends. We have fallen into the trap of believing
that prosperity and blessing equal God’s favor, and conversely that hardship
means God’s favor is absent.
The trouble is, when we read the
Bible, we often find the exact opposite to be true. Hardship seems to be the norm for people of
faith-- even when they are following God’s will for their lives. Abraham and his wife were unable to have
children, and they spent most of their life wandering about in the desert. Joseph was beaten by his brothers, sold into
slavery, and falsely accused of attempted rape.
Moses left a comfortable life as Pharoah’s son to lead the Israelites
out of Egypt and into the desert. And if
we could somehow dismiss all these examples, Jesus himself was called crazy by
his family, betrayed by his closest friends, wrongly accused, and
murdered. The love of God did not
protect His own son from hardship-- what makes us think it will protect us? It seems that by telling us these stories,
God wants us to know that if we are going through hard times, we are in good
company.
God isn’t afraid of pain the way
we are. There is something He values
much more than avoiding hardship-- and that’s a relationship with His children. That’s the reason He put two trees in the
garden, and gave Adam and Eve the choice to disobey. It’s why Jesus still chose to be born,
knowing he would be rejected and killed.
We need to understand that God looks at the bigger picture. He has a greater purpose than what we
immediately see.
James tells us to “Consider it
pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know
that the testing of your faith produces perseverance” (1:2). Did you catch that? Consider it joy when you face trials. I
don’t know about you, but joy is about the last word that comes to mind when I
am in the midst of a trial. This is not
an emotion we can simply muster up. We
will never experience joy in trials without God’s Spirit living inside of us,
changing our very nature. That’s the
whole point. We can’t do this without
God. We aren’t supposed to.
God’s desire was not for my
parent’s to get a divorce. But He used
their divorce to uncover lies that I had come to believe about His character. Through the pain I felt, He allowed me to
understand in part how Jesus felt. He
humbled me and showed me that looking pretty from the outside means nothing
when you are dead on the inside. He
accomplished more in my parent’s divorce than He ever could have in keeping
them together. God always accomplishes
His will. We don’t need to question
whether or not He is going to work a bad circumstance for good. He will.
He is. All we have to do is trust
Him.
“And we know that in all things God works for
the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28
