Sometimes God
sends us through a trial to save us from something worse. It can, however, take
us a long time to see it. When we do, it is our ‘a-ha’ moment. And every ‘a-ha’
moment has God’s fingerprints all over it.
But after the
trial comes a planting we can trust.
Take this
analogy:
It’s not until
you’re planted in a safe place, where you’re appreciated, valued, encouraged
and in sum accepted, that you can even realise something that happens when you’re
in such a place. You grow, don’t you? You cannot help but grow. You’re free to
become who God has ordained you to become. All the fetters are off and you’re
able to go where the Lord has purposed for you to go.
Many wander
through their lives and can never work out why their lives appear to them to be
going so wrong. Sometimes they’ve endured what has quenched the spirit within
them. How could they possibly grow in a place where trauma is an occasional or
potential reality, let alone a daily prospect?
For some, there
is the urgent reality of the valley of decision. Stay in a toxic seedbed where
growth can hardly occur or break clear?
As the seed is
sown into safe, fertile, well-seasoned soil, that dead root rests there for
some days or weeks and then springs alive, slowly rising north, climbing out of
the mud into the fresh oxygenated air. The moment it breaks the crust of earth,
having been buried and deprived of life, it breathes forth the beauty of creation.
Perhaps plants can’t think, but if the plant can feel, it feels imbued by hope.
And in continued safety it grows and blossoms and becomes — all it was destined
to become.
There are times
when our lives are like that seed that had to die before it could come alive
and have the opportunity to thrive.
Sometimes we
have to be planted deeply, and it’s ages before we can see the emergence of
what will ultimately blossom. It’s cruel that out of death comes what looks
like utter futility, and yet that is exactly the stuff of resurrection. Jesus
was as dead he could be before he rose from that grave. Entombed in the deepest
darkest hell, from there he arose. And it’s the same when we’ve been plucked
out of the clutches of what seemed like a hell we could no longer endure.
People may well
point the finger our way and say all kinds of disgusting things. Such a formula
for humanity is nothing new. When people do evil, they are not doing much new. The
truth tarries, and it might be some years before that dead seed in us that was
planted somewhere safe begins to emerge… in the fullness of God’s time. Not a
second beforehand.
In the meantime,
if that seed is in us, we hold out hope. That seed is hope. It is buried deep within us and what is dead can no longer
die, and what is destined to rise will at God’s time thrive. Here, in this
seed, is that knowledge we have that all will turn around for our vindication.
As we look at that ‘a-ha’ moment, we come to see it as an indwelt memory buried
deep in our psyche. It was always there! And in that is the reality that God
was there at our beginning — he sowed that seed in there before the days that
were written in his book ever came to pass!
Let me say it
again…
Sometimes God
sends us through a trial
to save us from something worse.
It can, however, take us a long time to see it.
When we do, it is our ‘a-ha’ moment.
And every ‘a-ha’ moment has
God’s fingerprints all over it.
to save us from something worse.
It can, however, take us a long time to see it.
When we do, it is our ‘a-ha’ moment.
And every ‘a-ha’ moment has
God’s fingerprints all over it.
The trial we may
despise may be protection
from something interminably worse:
compromise and complicity.
from something interminably worse:
compromise and complicity.
No comments:
Post a Comment