My heart is heavy today with devastating news from someone very close to me. At times like this, the world doesn’t seem to make very much sense. Everything feels gray and blank. But a deeper meditation of life yields other, wiser truths. The basis of human life is tragedy, not happiness. From the minute Adam and Eve made their choice, man has lived on the outside of Eden looking in. We are programmed to desire heaven, because this is the natural state in which we were designed to exist. But love, even God’s love, is not love without choice. It is tyranny or, at best, manipulation.
We choose every day to love or to hate. We choose every day to believe, or not to believe. We choose every day to try, or to give up. In the heartbreaking journey of infertility, the road is fraught with devastation. Many young couples seek to bring life into this world, what God designed for them, and they are met with roadblock after roadblock, heartbreak after heartbreak. To some, the roller coaster ride of emotions becomes too much to handle, and they give up or settle for adoption. Marriages are made stronger by this, or they fall apart.
Sometimes we pray that God’s grace would become manifest in our lives, but then every time we think we’re getting close, something happens. A huge disappointment, a personal stumbling block that dredges skeletons out of our closets and makes us re-evaluate our self-worth, a personal loss—illness, death, divorce…the list goes on and on. When these terrible things happen to us, we blame it on the Devil. But perhaps the very thing we call the Devil is in fact the necessary “firestorm” God has allowed in order to manifest His grace more deeply in our lives?
When we look back at the tragedies of our life, if we look closely, we can see the marvelous sovereignty of God working through the midst of suffering, granting and developing the grace of Christ in us IN our suffering, not despite it. We choose to believe that “all things work together for good to those who love God” Rom. 8:28. This belief cannot grow us into better people if it is not tested by the hardest measure. If everything in our lives stays calm and happy, there is no refining fire by which God can shape us into instruments of His love and mercy.
Oswald Chambers says that men today are not asking whether Christianity is true, but rather, is it REAL?
Walking through the firestorms of life, unscorched by the most bitter of life’s tragedies, empowered by a grace that is not of this world—that is real. People respect real. And when they seek it, they will find the truth as well.
