One line from my daily prayer.
Let me start out by saying that I have been blessed. God has opened many doors for me.
I believe in God…….a God who loves me, who has promised that he will take care of me, who has me in his hand.
Please don’t get me wrong…….I’m not looking for sympathy.
But……..God has also closed a lot of doors in my life……..more than my share, it seems.
Some of the time, this has sent me in a new direction that turned out well.
But, a lot of the time, even after waiting for decades, I just can’t see the silver lining.
For the life of me, I cannot see the upside of the illness, injury, and death that has stalked my family.
What to do?
Deny God? I could say that if God really cared about me, he would never have allowed this. So….either he doesn’t care…….or he doesn’t exist.
Hate God? I could accept his existence, but lash out at him for the closed doors……the bad things that he has done…….or at best has allowed to happen.
Suffer in silence? I could box God up in a corner and never go there…….isolate my pain from my creator. Blame it all on fallen man…….or Satan.
Scream at God:, “What in the world were you thinking?”, “Why did you throw my family under the bus?”, “Why aren’t you on my side?”
Or I could open up a conversation. Pray……..read the owners manual. I could try to see the big picture. I could try to look at this from God’s side.
And I would learn a few things about God……my father……..Abba.
He loves me.
Abba loves ME.
He has plans……..for me…….for my well-being.
He has prepared a place for me, an open place…….when he is finished with me…….in this place.
He also has plans for you……..and for several billion other people that neither of us has ever met…….or even imagined.
God, Abba, is weaving a giant tapestry of billions of lives…….and I can only see a few threads of it. Perhaps the black thread that runs through my family is there to support and contrast a golden thread nearby. Maybe my pain…….is helping somebody else.
So……..I will trust God.
I will trust in his love.
I will trust in his promises.
If my thread today is black……….I will trust God…….
I will serve my place in God’s design.
The key to successful living in hard times is to understand and accept that we are not at the center of the universe…….we are a tiny part of something much bigger……..that a creator who loves us is building something that we can neither see nor comprehend.
But God can see it all………and he loves you and me…….and he has promised that he will take care of everything……..in the end.
the Lord was my support.
He brought me out into a spacious place;
he rescued me because he delighted in me.
David, NIV
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
Jesus, NIV