“But I trust in you, Lord; I say, “You are my God.” Psalm 31:14 (NIV)
We’ve been talking a lot about how having a faith perspective is important in the life of a believer. You could argue with me that finding good in a tough financial situation isn’t nearly the same as when people have to deal with harder issues like ALS, cancer or death. How does the faith perspective come into practice with issues that are much more difficult – how do you explain “good” from those?
Let me try and answer that by coming at it from another angle. Would you ever attempt to explain the concepts of calculus to a one-year-old? Does a normal functioning one-year-old have the brain capacity to understand such complicated processes?
God knows that there are some things that happen here on earth that we will never be able to understand until we get to Heaven and see the big picture. That’s why sometimes when we ask God to explain, to help us understand, we are met with silence. Not silence in the fact that He isn’t there but silence in the fact He doesn’t provide the answers we seek.
While I will never fully understand why we had to lose a baby too early or why my family has dealt with chronic illness and pain, I’ve crossed over from the questioning stage to trust. I am choosing to look for and sometimes do see good that has come from heartache. Our family has a greater empathy for others that I believe we wouldn’t have necessarily had. Our family is a lot closer than we might have been had sickness and death not entered into our circle of love. Our family chooses to take the hurt and brokenness that we’ve experienced and use it to help others around us that are feeling similar or possibly even more painful experiences because we don’t want them to feel alone either.
However, there will still always be questions left unanswered. And that is when we simply choose to trust. Trust that while we don’t understand, God does. Trust that while we don’t have the answers, God does. Trust that while we don’t know what we will do next, we can look at life from the faith perspective and know God has this. He has us. He has the next step and the next step and the next step, as long as we keep letting Him lead and obey His directions.
Living life this way isn’t always easy. Sometimes, most of the time it seems, God’s timing is way slower than what I would like. I want Him to hurry up and make the bad go away so that I can stop hurting or worrying or feeling the weight of whatever situation is crushing me. But God doesn’t work that way. He knows that when we go through, all the way through, the experience, if we do it His way, in His time, learning the lessons He wants us to learn, we will be more mature on the other side and ready to help others. We will have a testimony that could point one more person to a personal relationship with Him. And that, my friends, is the main purpose of our life here on this earth. Pointing others to a personal relationship with our Lord and Savior. Because that is how we will all spend eternity with Him someday. I think we can all agree that is where we would like to be reunited someday with all our friends and family. But it all starts with a choice. A personal choice.
© Cheri Swalwell 2018