Comfort Others

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. --2 Corinthians 1:3-4

We walked in slowly to the house where they had just removed the body of John's beloved grandfather. Most of his family was already there. We expected to find weeping, but instead we found a circle of prayer. Heads bowed, hands joined, peace on each brow as words of praise instead of mourning were sent up to our Heavenly Father. We looked at each other briefly and joined in the circle. After the prayer, the family began to sing the full version of Amazing Grace before breaking up the circle.

Once the circle broke, John's widowed grandmother rushed across the room to me and took my hand in hers. She knew of the many losses I have been through that John and most of his family had been spared thus far. She looked into my eyes and whispered, "You know. You've been through this. No body else understands." I hugged her tightly with the empathy of a person who has survived the same fire. Even in the joy of a Christian's passing, in our human fraility we still need permission to mourn. Sometimes our Father uses our warm flesh to give comfort to others in the same way that He's used others to comfort us.

Our Ransom

God disciplines people with sickness and pain, with ceaseless aching in their bones. They lose their appetite and do not care for even the most delicious food. They waste away to skin and bones. They are at death's door; the angels of death wait for them. But if a special messenger from heaven is there to intercede for a person, to declare that he is upright, God will be gracious and say, "Set him free. Do not make him die, for I have found a ransom for his life." Then his body will become as healthy as a child's, firm and youthful again. When he prays to God, he will be accepted. And God will receive him with joy and restore him to good standing. He will declare to his friends, "I sinned, but it was not worth it. God rescued me from the grave, and now my life is filled with light." Yes, God often does these things for people. He rescues them from the grave so they may live in the light of the living. --Job 33:19-30

God's only Son, Jesus, paid the ransom for our lives. God loves us as much as He hates sin, and so He sent Jesus to pay the ransom for our lives so that we could live in the light. God did this because He knew that our sin would otherwise destroy us and because He loves us so much that He wants for us to live in the light instead of the darkness. He wants us to have joy and peace and to recognize that we cannot afford not to seek Him. The price of sin is too high (Romans 6:23). Often, we don't think of the cost of sin while we're sinning, but sooner or later we see a bill that is more than we want to pay. Jesus paid the bill for us. Because Jesus, His only Son, pleads with the Father for us to be set free from our bondage to sin and the eternal consequences of our sin, God accepts us and listens when we pray. He does not receive us reluctantly when His Son pleads for us like a parent reluctantly buying a toy for a child just so the child will stop pleading for it. No, when Jesus pleads for us, God receives us with joy and graciously restores us to right standing with Him. When He rescues us, we respond with gratitude in our hearts. He's given us the gift of memory so that we remember all we have to joyful about and thankful for. And sometimes He'll leave us with scars from our pre-rescue days just to ensure that we don't forget and return to our former ways. For our own good, He wants us to remember that sin is not worth the price. He wants us to continue to walk in the light. Thank Him today for His grace. He paid your ransom, and because of Him, you are free.

Bright Future

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." --Jeremiah 29:11

God has a plan for you. He has a plan for each of us, even if we don't always see the method to His madness while we walk the earth. But even though He has a plan, we're sometimes hesitant to seek it and walk in it. Those of us who have been walking with the Lord for any length of time know all too well that when God says He is going to prune away the parts of our characters and our lives that do not please Him (John 15:2), He means it. We also know that the process of having parts of you and your life sliced off, is not typically a pleasant experience. Since none of us by nature like to suffer and since we sometimes associate God's plan with suffering, we often seek our own way as the easy way out. But, ultimately, God's plan for us in not a plan of suffering. Yes, there may be some suffering involved along the way, but we can take comfort in the fact that our Father never allows suffering in our lives without a purpose. He uses the suffering to change and rebuild us, not to leave us permanently broken down. Suffering is not the goal of God's plan. Actually, His plans have quite the opposite end in mind according to God's words through Jeremiah. God has promised that the goal of His plan for each of us is goodness, peace, and hope. Even if we can't see it anywhere on our horizon, God has a good plan for our future. If we choose to our own way instead of God's, we may very well miss out on the full extent of goodness that He has planned for us. If we only saw the big picture, our momentary suffering may very well seem worth it! Instead of trying to avoid His discipline in our lives, we should rejoice that He loves us enough to prune us. Even more, instead of dread when we think of God's plan for us, we should wake up each morning filled with gratitude that we are allowed to be a part of a plan that includes a hopeful future.

Miraclous Works

LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy. --Habakkuk 3:2

You are amazing, Lord, and truly worthy of praise! You were there from before time began. You are beyond time and all time lies in Your hands. We praise You for the wonders of Your creation, for how You fearfully and wonderfully made each person that walks the earth (Psalm 139:14). We praise You for your mercy, for the way You led a rebellious people out of slavery and oppression in Israel and how You showed them Your wonderous power all along. Even more, we praise You for the merciful and selfless loving act of sacrificing Your only Son to save all future rebellious peoples from condemnation (John 3:16). We praise Your for the miraculous deeds You performed through Peter and Paul and others who followed You in the early days of the church. We praise You for the miracles You are still performing today. Father, we confess to You our own unbelief and the unbelief of many in our generation. We have become so self-sufficient in our abundance that we forget what it means to fall on our knees and depend solely on You. Father, we thank You for Your patience with our unbelief (Mark 9:24-29) and we pray for a renewal of faith throughout Your body that we might see Your glory displayed more often. Lord, just as Moses cried out in days of the exodus out of Egypt, we cry that You would show us Your glory (Exodus 33:18). Lord, many of us in the body have heard of Your awesome deeds but have not seen them first hand. We believe, Lord, but we long for the fresh revival of faith that you are beginning to move throughout Your people. Father, some say that the time of miracles has passed, but we know that You are unchanging and You are just as much a God of the miraculous today as You were 2000 years ago. Our hearts cry out to see Your glory, Lord! We pray for a renewal of Your awesome deeds in our day. Lord, for the sake of Your name and Your fame, renew Your wondorous works and make them known throughout our world. Father, in the midst of Your wrath at our spiritual laziness, remember the mercy You have shown us for thousands of generations. Bless us with a fresh glimpse of Your glory and Your wonders. Renew our spirits, our hearts, our minds, and our souls with a fresh revelation of all that You are and all that You can do if we would just believe You (Matthew 17:20). Lord, we praise Your holy name and thank You for the power that You want to exercise in each of our lives by faith. Oh, Lord, we want to see more people fall on their knees in awe of You!

For Love of Money

"Money is like everything. Money is like sex. It's like food. They're all manifestations of God. They're blessings that we get, but they're not what are going to make us happy. They're not real. They don't last. There's only one thing that lasts, and that's your soul. And if you don't work on that, and you don't pay attention to that, then all the money in the world is not going to help you." --Madonna

Madonna is certainly one who has had enough money to know very well both its power and its emptiness. I don't know that I agree that money is a manifestation of God, that strikes me as a little overboard even though I agree that God can choose to bless us finanacially and materially. I do, however, agree with the essence of Madonna's statement. Money is nice to have, but money is no substitute for a right spirit, for living with, through, and for God.

My struggle is that as much as I agree with these sentiments, I still find myself caught up the American way of keeping up with the Joneses. I want the big house that we cannot afford, I want the new clothes that I don't need, I want the freedom to travel and eat out and live beyond my means. Even though I may know on some level that these things don't fulfill, I am still generally brainwashed by a culture that tells me not only do these things bring fulfillment, but they pave the only road to happiness. I know I'm not the only one in our culture caught up in the cycle of unecessary want.

Our many wants demonstrate a very big need. We need fulfillment. Madonna is right, we won't find that with money (or with any other man-made substance). In fact, money has quite the opposite effect from fulfillment. The more money we get, the more money we want. We think we'll be satisfied with just a little more, but when we get that, we realize that we are still empty, so we set the bar a little higher. We think that the only reason our god money hasn't fulfilled us is because we still need more. But Madonna, someone who has more than enough money, indicates that her obscenely high net worth has primarily taught her that net worth doesn't matter at all.

So what does matter? What does fulfill? Solomon asks this question over and over in the book of Ecclesiastes. Like Madonna, he had a high value by society's superficial and materialistic standards, but he found that no matter how much he had, he still felt empty. I believe that God included Ecclesiastes in the Bible for a very specific reason. He knew that thousands of years later, we would still need to learn the same lesson that Solomon learned. God created us with an emptiness that needs filling on purpose, and He wants us to recognize that we cannot produce or provide for our own fulfillment. He gave us the ache of always wanting more because He wants us to turn to Him as the Source (John 7:37-39).

Brainwashing by society won't hold much water as a plea before God when He asks why I lived with such a preoccupation for the material. Paul writes in Galatians 6:5 and 8, "we are each responsible for our own conduct.... Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful desires will harvest the consequences of decay and death. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit." Living first for money and then for Him is a choice that we make, and God will hold us responsibile for that choice. God does not accept second place in our lives. True followers of God need not be destitute, and some may in fact be quite well-off financially. But whatever their socio-economic status, true followers of God need to keep money in its rightful place--as a blessing--and keep God in His right place--on the throne. Nothing less will lead us to true life (John 4:4-26).

Redemption

Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? Will God? No! He is the one who has given us right standing with himself. Who then will condemn us? Will Christ Jesus? No, for he is the one who died for us and was raised to life for us and is sitting at the place of highest honor next to God, pleading for us. --Romans 8:33-34

Enough could never be written about the work Christ did for His children on the cross. He suffered a painful death in order to make us right with God. He who had no sin took the condemnation of our sin upon Himself so that we would no longer have to bear it. Thanks to Christ, we are now what we never could have been without Him--right with God. And after the magnitude of the act of dying a sinner's death for a sinful world, Christ continues to sit on His throne and plead (intercede) on our behalf as we continue to lead lives that are less than righteous before God.

For too many of us who have been Christians for a long time, this message has been repeated so much that we are almost desensitized to it. Many of us no longer feel in our spirits what He did for us because we accepted Him awhile ago, and we have gone on living lives that, while changed, no longer reflect the power that God gave us when He sent His Son to overcome the darkness within each of us. For us, it takes a powerful movie like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ to move us emotionally towards recognition of the depth of what Christ did for us. And that emotional high may only last a couple days before we revert back to our state of non-excitement.

God does not want us to always seek the emotional high, but neither does He want for us to lighten the weight of Christ's sacrifice to a point where we are not down-on-our-knees-grateful on a daily basis. Even on the days we don't feel the emotional freedom that Christ has given us, we are wrong to take His sacrifice for granted. He has bridged the gap between us and God, something that could not have otherwise happened. If we are not constantly overwhelmed with gratitude, then a good place to start would be to read Romans 8:31-39 outloud every morning until God has firmly written the words on our hearts and the sacrifice He made for us is ever-implanted into our consciousness. We need to fully grasp not only the nature of the sacrifice itself, but also all that the sacrifice did for us. One act with more power than we could ever muster without God's help.

Jail Break

Me inside a jail cell in Alcatraz.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. --Galatians 5:1

When we become Christians, God sets us free from sin's enslaving power. Because of His Holy Spirit's power in us, we no longer have to submit to our sinful desires or be in prison to our sinful ways. We are free. Christ died for us so that we would be free. He did not die for us to stay in our self-created prisons; He died for our freedom.

Yet even knowing that through Him I am free, I find that it sometimes feels easier or safer to stay within the bars of the cell I've created for myself in my self-destructive habits. I recognize and understand the cell I've created with my bad habits. I may not be happy in it, but I trust it because I know what it will bring me. Freedom is unknown and unfamiliar ground, and I don't always trust that I'll like it there. Even though my experience in freedom has been wonderful, when times get tough and I need God the most, I actually find that I'm more likely to slink back to my prison cell for a taste of the small security that I find within its familiar walls.

Christ desires for us to embrace the freedom that He died for us to have. That is in fact why He died, and it hurts His heart to see us choose our prison cells over freedom. Galatians 5:1 tells us to no longer be burdened by our former slavery. We have a choice to accept Christ's free offering of freedom and leave our old lives behind. He's unlocked the door to our prison cell, we need only to make the effort of stepping out from behind the bars and walking in freedom. We don't have to wait for heaven to take hold of what is promised to us. We are free already, now we just have to live like it.

Mental Obedience

God wants to reign in your mind. Not by force, and not in the negative, brainwashing, never-have-a-thought-of-your-own kind of way. God gave us minds with the ability to reason and think logically for a reason. He wants to have a genuine relationship with all of our parts, and He can't do that if we just blindly accept what we're told without questioning and getting genuine with Him in terms of the thoughts in our minds. At the same time that God wants us to use our minds to think, He also wants us to know that He cares about the nature of the thoughts we think.

For many of us, our thoughts are not very nice. And we justify our not-so-nice thoughts and negative attitudes by telling ourselves that it's not wrong/sinful to think bad things as long as we don't act on them. But that false belief does not line up with God's word. In fact, In Colossians 1:21, we're told that we were once "his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions" [emphasis mine]. Logically speaking: Wrong thoughts can cause separation from God. Sin is that which separates us from God. Therefore, wrong thoughts are sin.

When we become Christians, we are called to change our ways so that our lives match up with our beliefs. Paul writes in Ephesians 4:21-23, "Since you have heard all about him and have learned the truth that is in Jesus, throw off your old evil nature and your former way of life, which is rotten through and through, full of lust and deception. Instead, there must be a spiritual renewal of your thoughts and attitudes." Look carefully at verse 23. In order for us to throw off our evil ways, our thoughts and attitudes--that stuff that happens in our minds--must be spiritually renewed. In life, most of what we do and say starts in our mind. If we our minds are in the wrong place, that's the first step towards our words/actions/lives being in the wrong place. Think of old cartoons when a character is deliberating between a good choice and a bad choice with a little devil whispering thoughts in one ear and a little angel whispering thoughts in the other ear. That may be a funny image, but it is fairly respresentative of how we first think in our minds and then act on what we think. If we give evil a sounding board in our minds, evil will eventually sound right. In the same way, when we "Fix [our] thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise" (Philippians 4:8), then we speack/act/live accordingly.

Ensuring that our thoughts are honorable to God requires some active thinking on our parts. When thoughts come into our head, we can choose to place them into the "good" category or the "rubbish" category. We should hold onto the thoughts in the "good" category, and we should either disregard or reframe the thoughts in the "rubbish" caegory. This process is how "We capture every thought and make it give up and obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5b, NCV). If we let our thoughts run amuk without any checks and balances to keep them in line with the truth, then they are likely to wander into the enemy's territory and our words/actions/lives will soon follow. On the other hand, if we take ownership over our thoughts and choose to give them to God's purposes, then God will transform our thoughts and attitudes and therefore our words/actions/lives.

Having said all of that, our will alone is not enough to effect this change of thinking. Rules and self-discipline "have no effect when it comes to conquering a person's evil thoughts and desires" (Colossians 2:23). But fortunately for us, where our will and actions fail, the Holy Spirit's power succeeds. That is why in Ephesians 4:21-23 quoted above, the spiritual renewal of our thoughts comes after we've heard about Jesus and accepted His truth. Once we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, God fills us with His Holy Spirit so that the transformation in Ephesians 4 can take place. God is a gentleman and won't influence our thoughts without our permission. Moreover, because of the free will that God wants us to have so that He can have a genuine relationship with each of us, even once we've accepted Him, He still won't control our minds. We have to let His Holy Spirit empower us to submit our thoughts to Him. This is a day-to-day and moment-to-moment process rather than a one-time brain changing. We serve God fullest when we give Him our thoughts along with the rest of us, but like the rest of our walks, it's a choice we have to consciously and continuously make along our journey.

Created Splendor

Christ is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can't see - kings, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities. Everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything else began, and he holds all creation together. --Colossians 1:16-17

John and I just returned from an extended weekend in San Francisco, CA. We were there for a wedding, but since neither of us had been to San Francisco before, we allowed time to explore. Having never been to the west coast, or even most of the middle of the country before, I am probably more easily impressed than most when it comes to natural beauty. Having seen little, it takes little to impress my sheltered eyes, and San Francisco surely left me swooning. I am a sucker for blue skies, lush trees, and sparkling water. During our brief stay, we found San Francisco to have an abundance of all three. I'm also a sucker for breathtaking views, and with it's rolling hills and endless coastline, San Francisco has more views than two people can hope to take in during a short 4-day stretch. I remarked more than once to John that I hadn't anticipated being so impressed with the scenery. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I actually chose to wake up early two of the four mornings we spent there to jog along the bay near our Fisherman's Wharf hotel.

In the face of such moving natural beauty, I couldn't help but marvel at the works of God's hands. He created the trees and green fields that I take for granted in Maryland at the same time that He created the cliffs and beaches of California. He filled the oceans with salt water and plopped continents down in their midst. Though Christ didn't walk the earth until many thousands of years after God wove and spun the created world we see, God created everything through Christ and for Christ. While He didn't appear in flesh until creation was old news, Christ existed before the oceans, before the hills, and before the most aged of trees. God created all things through Christ for His pleasure. Even now in the midst of my jet lag, I sit here in awe of God's art. In just the little fragments of creation that I have seen with my eyes, I am left breathless. Imagine if I would be able to see all of creation and not just a tiny segment!

What inspires even more awe to swell in my chest is that for all the beauty that I have seen and could see with my human eyes, God has created even more beauty in the unseen Kingdom that I won't ever be able to glimpse while I'm walking this earth. And more so, all of this creation, both seen and unseen, He balances in His hand. My mind is too small to begin to comprehend the breadth or complexity of God's hand in which He holds all of creation together--what I can see, what I cannot see, what I have yet to see--in His palm. Meditating on His vastness this weekend in light of the little bit more of creation He allowed for me to be privy to has invigorated my spirit. Today, on four hours of sleep with a body still caught between time zones, I continue ride the wide and tall wave of wild love for a God who can rejuvinate a spirit with a mere glance and create a universe out of His personal overflow of beauty and grace.

What our spirits are made of

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. -2 Timothy 1:7

God's word has much to say about times of trial and testing. But before trial hits, I think it's important to be prepared (1 Peter 5:8). The verse above from 2 Timothy was written by Paul to encourage Timothy in his ministry of evangelism. This verse was not written to comfort Timothy is a trial, but to encourage Timothy before the trial starts or worsens. As such, I find each aspect of this verse useful in fortifying our own hearts, minds, and souls for God's work in our lives. Meditating on these truths is a sort of preemptive strike against the enemy's lies that are aimed at disheartening us.

God has not given us a spirit of fear. In other words, fear is not from God, it is from the enemy. Courage is from God. Satan tries to work by placing doubt and fear of the unknown into our minds. But God gave us a spirit that knows no fear--a spirit with the courage to trust God with all of our needs. If we give into fear, we are giving into the enemy and not utilizing the spirit that God has placed within us. When we feel fear creeping in, we should recognize it for what it is--the enemy's handiwork--and for what it is not--real according to God's spirit within us.

The spirit God has placed in His children is one of power. In difficult circumstances, we may be tempted to give into lies and feel hopeless. But we are not ever hopeless. God has given us spirits of power and sometimes the greatest power comes when our spirits place full trust in God--when our spirits are in harmony with His Spirit. We don't always have control over our circumstances, but we do always have control over our reactions. Part of the power in our spirit comes from our free will with which we can make a choice about how we react. Our spirits exercise power over the enemy when we take circumstances that he hopes will devestate us and we choose not to be devestated. We have victory over the darkness when we choose trust and peace over despair.

God has also given us a spirit of love. Looking at God's character and Jesus' life, I truly believe that God created us to love with complete abandon. I think that the ways we "protect" ourselves by putting barriers up in our hearts hurt His heart. We build the barriers out of self-preservation because we listen to the lies of the enemy about people, our circumstances, and the future. In part, I think that God won't allow us to know what tomorrow holds because He knows that if we knew, we may choose not to love fully and completely as God loves all of His children, the lost ones included. All any of us has is today and we need to use each day to give of ourselves and our hearts without reservation or regret.

Finally, God has given us a spirit of a sound mind (or self-discipline, depending on the translation). This spiritual trait is particularly crucial to the Christian life during trial. Consider Job, for example. Satan requested permission to throw slings and arrows at Job because Satan knows that when times get hard, it's very easy for him to feed us with lies and lead us into temptation. But what Job (and Jesus during his temptation) demonstrates is God's higher calling on our lives. God wants us to remember in times when we're tempted to fear or lose heart that He gave us the sound mind/self-discipline to turn to Him for our hope, strength, and peace. Instead of giving into human fraility and losing our in place of our sound mind, we can choose to discipline ourselves to turn to God every time we feel the fear creeeping in.

Knowing and believing each of these aspects about the spirit God gave us will prove invaluable when trial comes (as it inevitably will). The best advice I could give to someone setting out on the Christian journey (or someone far along) is to meditate on this verse and keep each word of it on the tip of your tongue. Do not be deceived into thinking that hard times and testing won't come. They will come because they are part of the plan and part of the nature of fallenness. But know that when they come, you don't have to react with fear or weakness. In the very nature of the spirit that He has placed within us, God has given us exactly what we need to withstand any test or trial.

Believing in the Impossible

"Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where man's power ends." --George Muller

But Jesus looked at them and said, "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible." --Mark 10:27

Some Christians believe that miracles were only something God did in early church times. I disagree. I don't think that God ever quit the miracle business. I think that we are just more unbelieving and less inclined to pay attention to Him, and, at the same time, we are more inclined to seek rational explanations for everything. Well-meaning Christians even try to "prove" the faith to non-believers using scientific data. The problem with such an approach to evangelism is that it misses the point of faith. According to Hebrews 11:1, faith is Biblically defined as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Faith is all about what we can't see or rationalize or prove. That was God's purpose and that is where He is more glorified. If there was scientific data and everyone believed in Him like they believe in gravity, then there would be no value in faith at all and no glory for the God who longs for us to seek Him and believe Him even though we don't see (see John 20:29).

Part of the problem with proof seeking is that it limits God to human understanding. God is too big to fit in our little boxes. In fact, His reign is higher than all our boxes stacked on top of each other and multiplied by 150. Rationalism requires concrete evidence and contain only that which is possible. While God is possible, but He is also more than what is possible by human standards. A focus on the possible hinders the power of our prayer. If we don't believe that God is still a God of the miraculous, we won't ask Him to do what is impossible, and He will not be glorified. Yes, even when we pray small prayers, God may still choose to show Himself in a more powerful and amazing way than we imagined, but He's not as likely to do so as He is when we ask Him to do the impossible.

The other issue with our asking God for the impossible is our motivation. Our society is very self-focused and self-seeking. If we ask God for a miracle with self-focused and self-seeking motivation, He will most certainly not oblige (Mark 8:12). God does not exist for our glory; we exist for God's glory. If we are seeking for God to do the impossible so that we will be proven right or so that our will shall be done, God won't listen to us (James 4:2-3). God does the impossible, like raise week-old corpses from the dead (John 11:38-44), when it will bring Him glory and increase His creation's faith, not when it will bring His creation glory instead of Him.

God's glory comes out of His will being done and His plan being carried out, and sometimes miracles can play a role when we are open to receiving the miracle for what it is--God doing the impossible. God is glorified when we have the faith to believe Him for the impossible even when all we see and hear is the possible. He is still just as much a God of the impossible--i.e., the miraculous--as He was in Biblical times. If we aren't seeing miracles, it's either because we aren't looking for the impossible or because He's patiently waiting for us to look at Him with our hearts of faith instead of our minds of logic.

No one said life was gonna be fair...

I have lived long enough to know that life isn't fair. Stuff happens, and sometimes there is no reason for it. People suffer for their sins and the sins of others. Pain is inherent in this fallen world. Yet even though I know that life isn't fair, it is still hard for me to watch people suffer who, in my personal opinion, have had more than their share of suffering in life while others skate by for years with barely a scratch on their souls. Case in point: my good friend Jen who has not had an easy life or a supportive family to walk with her through her many trials. She is getting married this weekend to a wonderful man, but even her wedding won't be crisis free. At the end of last week, her soon-to-be-husband lost the top joint on his right index and middle fingers. He was making Jen a jewelry box to surprise her and the electric saw severed those two joints. This event has created a ripple of difficulties that are all made worse by the fact that they are getting married this weekend and have the last minute wedding stress on top of everything else. And, to make matters even worse, she is living in California while most of her support network is here in the DC area. Talking with her yesterday broke my heart. In my opinion, she deserves to be happy and relaxed for at least a little while given everything else that has happened in her life. But that is just my opinion, and as Jim Carrey learned in Bruce Almighty, it easy for us to tell God how to do His job, but it's another thing for us to actually see what would happen if we had our way all the time.

I know that in even the worst of crises, God is always working for good (Romans 8:28). He uses circumstances that we see as tragic for His glory. I also know that God expects more of some people (Luke 12:48) depending on what He's given them and that He uses our trials to mold us into better people (James 1:2-4). But even knowing all this, my sense of fairness is still vastly different from my Creator's. I guess this is all part of my limited vision. God sees the bigger picture; I see only what is in front of me. God knows the greater plan; I only know what I think the plan should be. I am insignificant; God is omnipotent, omniscent, and omni-present. Many modern theologians would say that God is raising some people up to be overcomers, and He will put those people through more fire than others in order to make them stronger for His Kingdom purposes. I am in no place to tell Him who He should test and try and who He should leave alone, nor am I in any place to tell Him what His timing should be in our trials. Yet sometimes I feel the temptation to cry out to Him and ask "WHY?!" I'm sure He gets that a lot from all His limited-vision creatures. Fortunately, He understands our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15) and is patient with our lack of understanding. He knows we will never comprehend the big picture until we see Him face to face, but He wants us to trust Him with the big picture anyway. Somedays this is more difficult than others.

Live Intentionally

So I run straight to the goal with purpose in every step. --1 Corinthians 9:26a

God's been showing me lately that the Christian life is one that we must choose each day to live with intention. It's not something that happens for us once we're saved; it's something we have to work at daily. Paul describes it as "purpose in every step." Our spiritual and life walks must be about intention and focus, because if we aren't careful, we could miss our purpose and wind up playing for the wrong team (see 1 Peter 5:8). Christians sometimes make the mistake in evangelizing of implying to the rest of the world that walking with God is a walk in the park. It's not, and God never said it would be. We have to pursue spiritual growth with dilligence in order to align our walks with God's will. If we aren't being fed by the Word, prayer, and fellowship with other believers, we are likely to lose our focus and walk aimlessly. God wants to lead us, but we must choose to follow. God has a purpose for each step we take, but we must choose to seek His purpose and obey His calling on our lives each day.