This blog entry is adapted from a letter to a friend from August 2012. He was going through some difficult road in several aspects of his life and I felt prompted to write him. I came across it today and thought I would change the names and pretty it up a little so that I could post it.
--
Friend,
Thanks for sharing your “journeying realities” (the hard stuff) with me.
God has been seriously hitting me from all angles with this theme through two or three separate books and various preachers I have listened to in the past couple of weeks. I don’t know if any of this will help you or encourage you, but I have learned not to resist if I feel a prompting to write something. Just pass it off as, “Brian being a dork”, if what I am going to tell you doesn't find a home in your situation. Just take some time and process what I am saying and listen to it with your heart. Maybe this stuff is just new to me, and you have fully assimilated this already, or maybe this will be a good reminder.
My own situation is that I am becoming more and more calm about my own "journeying realities" as I realize that God is less concerned with making my life work, and much more concerned that my heart is inclined towards Him. This has not come easy to me by any means.
Here is the thing about marriage and all close relationships! Let’s use you as an example. Even as a child, your background of pain, in your spiritually dead state, made your sinful flesh ball up a tight little fist against God in some way and say, “I will not be hurt this way again!” This is when sin AGAINST you, was converted to sin IN you. The problem is that when we take that stance, whatever the specifics, it warps us and makes us vulnerable to more sin. Later, we bring that into a relationship with another flawed human with a balled up fist, and this is a recipe for perfection. By perfection I mean that God uses our relationships to perfect us through great suffering. He uses not only our romantic relationships, but also our children, our bosses, our parking attendant, and every other human being that we have the opportunity to have a personal conflict with.
I heard a definition of sanctification recently that I loved. It went something like this, “Sanctification is The painful process by which God extracts us from priorities and pleasures that we have placed above Him.”
Primarily, we come face to face with our sins, failures, terrifying “journeying realities” and have a personal “Alamo moment”, which can last much longer than a moment. We come to the end of our ability to prop up the religious idea that “if I do good stuff that God likes, God will GIVE me good stuff back.” WE know this isn’t good theology, and we would never admit that we believe it…but our actions say we do. God knows just the right places to apply pressure to bring that terrible theology crashing down.
When we really hit that point and get frustrated enough to jump off the lofty cliffs of our expectations of a good life, we find that the scarlet cord of “Knowing God” is more than strong enough to keep us from crashing into the rocks below. The ugly stuff we go through is designed to get us to finally jump and realize that He is all we need. We can quickly learn that we have been serving our selfish need to have “blessing” in our lives rather than serving the God who is allowing life to process us through sufferings, which probably won’t look anything like our ideal picture of blessing.
This brings us crosswise to God’s purpose and puts us in the unenviable position of idolatry. It is hard to see sometimes, but in the wrong context, tending the things in our lives that could make our lives seem better can actually be a subtle but still heinous form of idolatry. Imagine Joseph devising an escape plan out of the prison, or creating an uprising among the prisoners against the warden. “Well,” he would say, “it seemed like the way out of an unfair situation!” But, sometimes the way out, isn’t God’s way. And God’s way is ALWAYS the better way, even if we don’t see the immediate results.
I am not talking negatively about bettering yourself, or looking for a different job, working on communication skills with your wife, or being a more caring and encouraging parent to your child. But, I am talking about any one of those things when they become “first things” instead of “second things”. If you humbly pray for things you need from God, but when he seems to be saying, “not now”, it ticks you off and you get offended, then you may ask yourself, “Is God highlighting a place inside me that needs to find rest in him and his over-arching plan for me? Am I just ticked off because I thought he was my ticket to the “cookie jar” of blessing?”
This is a stinging truth, and a difficult reality. But it is also the most lovely place of peace that can be found: when we can derive more pleasure from our relationship with God than we do with the stuff He blesses us with, we will find that when everything is stripped away, if everyone leaves us- if we have lost love, health, and cable T.V. - even in that dark place… something inside us isn’t destroyed. The light inside of us isn’t snuffed out. There is a pleasure in God that continues through it all. The truth is that, in Christ, something about us truly IS indestructible! A 747 could fall on your head, but if God didn't say it was time to come home, you would be just fine.
He has more blessings for us than we are prepared to ask for, but He will not put our souls in danger by giving us that which will destroy us. That is part of His goodness, and that is evidence of His great mercy. It is also a marvelous sign that you are His kid, and that He is a wonderful dad!
Brian
