When God Sucker Punches You

Photo credit: leunix (Creative Commons)

I couldn’t even believe what I was hearing. The medical diagnosis was shocking. Something I was not prepared for emotionally. I’d just been sucker punched. I could look back on the last few years and see how the symptoms fit what had been happening in my life. That didn’t mean it made sense for me today though. Beyond confusion though, I was angry. At God.

How could you do this to me God? I thought you loved me? Where is the love today – did you forget it at home?

I know I am not alone in this feeling. You’ve been there too. We all have. It might be a medical situation, like it was for me. Maybe it’s the death of your child. A divorce. The overwhelming darkness we see on the evening news every day. Unemployment.

This is a big moment in our faith. When things get serious, and we have to decide what we really believe, because what we know and what we see don’t reconcile.

What we see is…well, it’s a disaster. Life is ripping apart at the seams and we just don’t know how to make sense of it. Hope is a distant memory, and things just gets worse when we try to reconcile our reality with what we see in the Bible. James 1:2-4 is a perfect example.

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.

Yes, JOY is exactly how I want to consider my trials. Sheer and utter joy. A trip to Disneyland without lines. And yet, that’s what it sounds like the Bible is telling us to do. What God expects from us, when He’s the one who sucker punched us in the first place. But maybe there is more going on than we realize in the moment.

God has the long term view of who we are becoming in the pain we are experiencing. He sees the end from the beginning and rejoices over the maturity we arrive at through the sorrow we go through now. It is from this place of eternity that God calls us to rejoice in trials, and it is the ultimate test of trusting Him. It comes down to a single question:

Do you trust God more than you trust your circumstances?

Answering this question is perhaps the key to writing the story of our life. As we learn to say yes, we are able to walk into a place of greater favor with God. To see life through His eyes, with His perfect vision. Our wounds get healed. We find hope. We discover the courage to move past our pain and into the destiny God has for us. We get unstuck.

 

Fear, Trust and Parenting – Part 4 of 4

My oldest son is 17, in his junior year of school, and now gainfully employed at McDonald’s. In less than two years, he will be done with high school. We are having conversations right now about what college to go to, his top choices for majors, and how to get through his schooling with as little debt as possible. We have come a LONG way from potty training and multiplication tables. He is well past the stage of life where his decisions are easily reversible, and is now moving steadily into adulthood.

My wife and I have worked hard for all the years of his life to teach Jonathon how to live an honorable life; how to love deeply; how to walk purely; how to think then act, not the other way around; how to understand God’s Word; how to worship freely; how to spend and save money wisely.  We have given our best to him, invested all the energy we could muster (and more), in the hope and expectation that he will have every opportunity to succeed in his life, and to surpass us in every way.

Yet even here, fear has a chance to take hold of me, if I let it. What if I haven’t taught him everything he needs to know? What if we missed something really important, and he falls into some trap that he cannot escape from, but he never even knew the trap existed? The questions can go on and on, if I let them. Some days, I do let these thoughts paralyze me, cause me to question my parenting, my love, and my son’s readiness for adulthood? In those moments, when I allow doubt to creep in, I get stuck. And then, a favorite verse comes to mind:

The key here for me is “when he is old” – as much for what it does NOT say as for what it does say. Proverbs doesn’t say when he is 19, or a college graduate, or a new dad, or a high school junior. No, it says “when he is old.”  My wife Barbara and I have spent literally hundreds of hours building into Jonathon the values, theology, morals, kindness, wisdom, humor and love that he have within our hearts. We have given him our all, and we will continue to do so as he moves into adulthood. We hope and pray he will move forward into a vibrant life in Christ that he has already started, and that we won’t have to pin our hopes on “when he is old.”

I don’t have any answers, and I don’t think Proverbs is a magic bullet for good little Christian families. I have seen too many friends go through the heartache of watching their children walk away from the church, and eventually from God Himself. But I still remember being too young, and believing that I knew EVERYTHING, regardless of how ignorant I really was. I also remember waking up one day, and realizing how foolish I had been. So as my son walks into adulthood, my prayers are for his protection from the darkness of the world, and from the foolishness of youth. But beyond that, I take a stand against the fear that says “Your son will fail,” and trust that he will be the man we have taught him to be.