Your Pain and God’s Love

Date:   For the Week of February 28, 2011

There is a strange but predictable thing that happens in the human mind during hard times and crises. It is something of a spiritual calculus that ties the ratio of divine love to human suffering. By all human calculation, the greater my comfort with life, the greater my certainty that God knows and loves me; the greater my pain and struggle, the less confident I am that he cares about me.

But that’s all wrong. Human circumstance has never been a reliable index either to one’s spiritual status or her value to God.

For more than a dozen years, Joseph was either a slave or a prisoner in a country where he had no civil rights or legal protection. By the calculus of our time and place, anything beyond a few days or weeks of suffering would be taken as solid proof that God had abandoned Joseph.

Job lost his children, fortune, health, and friends. By the rule of inverse ratio between divine love and human comfort, God had forgotten that good man. A faith-filled prayer should have healed him. That it didn’t would be taken as incontrovertible evidence for God’s failure in Job’s life, if not for his nonexistence.

Tamar was raped. Samson was betrayed by a woman he tried to trust. Ruth’s husband died, and she had to fend for herself in a hostile culture. An unnamed man in John 9 was born blind. Prophets were put in dungeons, thrown to wild animals, and forced to watch their children be murdered.

If the relationship between divine concern and human comfort really holds, not one person in the paragraph above was the object of God’s love.

For that matter, what would you think of a child born before his parents had been married nine months, shuttled from pillar to post during infancy, and forced to grow up under circumstances that would haunt him for his entire life? Then suppose he died young - the victim of an unjust legal system? If the alignment of God’s love and our good fortune are necessary to faith, Jesus should have renounced the whole spiritual enterprise.

The point of all this is that the world’s calculus is wrong. Or perhaps the point is that you and I must be on guard against thinking the world’s way. Otherwise, we get drawn into the trap of citing our woes as the justification for unbelief.

There is absolutely no correlation between your circumstance today and God’s faithful love. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, your situation may be only a period of discipline prior to entering the Promised Land. Like Paul’s thorn in the flesh, it may be your invitation to experience God’s grace at a deeper level.

“What we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later” (Romans 8:18 NLT).

Reagan on Good Intentions Gone Haywire

Date:   For the Week of February 21, 2011

            Memories of Ronald Reagan were revived recently in connection with the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Whether the former president was a political hero to you or not, surely you have to admit that he was a masterful communicator. Recent mention of him reminds me of a story he told before the National Association of Towns and Townships.

            He was lamenting government's inability to solve all the problems of our nation - and lamenting even more the expectations of so many that government should solve all those problems. This was his set-up and story . . .

            "Well-intentioned individuals thought if they were only given the power they could right every wrong. As I said, they were well-intentioned, but there's a well- known road paved with good intentions. No one likes to go where it takes you.

            "There's a story about a young fellow riding a motorcycle. He had good intentions too. The wind was kind of chilly and coming through the buttonholes on his jacket, and so he got this idea. He stopped and put his jacket on backward and that eliminated the chill factor through the buttonholes, but it kind of restricted his arm movement. And down the road, his motorcycle hit a patch of ice. He skidded into a tree. When the police got there, a crowd had gathered. And they elbowed their way through and they said, 'What happened?' And one of them said, 'Well, we don't know. When we got here he seemed to be all right, but by the time we got his head turned around straight, he was dead.'

            "I think that has a tie-in with some of the things the government does."

            The story got howling laughter from his audience back in 1983. But the issue of good intentions gone awry is perpetually relevant. So his story fits some of your personal and family decisions. It probably describes some company policies you recall - or with which you are wrestling. It certainly applies to many decisions and programs and appointments in churches.

            When there has been a wreck in spite of your good intentions, you can only hope there have not been too many fatalities. But you do have to be courageous enough to name the decision or action for what it turned out to be - mistaken, damaging, just plain wrong. Having named it, apologize. Ask forgiveness. And ask for God's help in putting things right again.

            Good intentions don't cancel out bad decisions or fatal outcomes. We are still accountable for them and can only pray for wisdom to do the right thing now.           

            "There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death" (Proverbs 14:12 NIV).