The miracle of ‘God finally makes sense’ after disaster’s struck

It’s a human default to get the cart before the horse, and though it’s never God’s way to make such an error, for us it’s a matter of course.  The only saving grace is that it’s common to humanity.

Here’s a stereotypical situation: you evangelise people ‘into the kingdom’, only for them, at times, to realise that it is nothing like what was promised.  It’s not all upside!  (More of human effort of bright lights and smoke machines than of the transforming Spirit of God revealed in a real time set of experiences.)  Suddenly life gets tougher than they ever imagined, and this person who was recently converted begins to think that God and our faith is fake.  “It doesn’t work!” is their response.

Little do they realise that, at this moment,
when life becomes insanely hard,
is where the tyres of our faith really hit the road.

If we live long enough and are open-minded enough, we will find that everything about life comes back to God.  Though many people despise this idea, there are just too many big issues in life that cannot be explained otherwise.  So it is a great thing to accept.  We, in our bodies, are here for only a little time and then we are gone.  Now is the time to discover that God is the answer; but we reach out curiously only when every other scaffold-of-reliance is ripped away from us.

I think God only makes sense in the more complete way when we face problems and issues that are far too big for us to rationalise, accept, or even process.  It is counterintuitive to contemplate that life must break us before most of us are ready to say, “Okay, God, enough of me; whatever you want from now on — that’s got to be infinitely better!”

It’s when we are confounded for response, and we lurch from one bad reaction to another, that we finally find we have no other way through but through the ways of God.

God is ever patient through this process, allowing our bumbling half-efforts of obedience.  We never feel judged by God in this process, and never are we condemned, even though we will judge and condemn ourselves, and if we aren’t watchful, we may be deceived to think our judging and condemning ourselves is God — it is not!

Just at the point in our lives when we cannot make sense of anything is when God begins to make the most sense to us.

We may read these words not having experienced any such a calamitous situation; perhaps we’ve never had that circumstance that we could not extract ourselves from.

Realising that this possibility is true, that calamity is possible for us too, yet in not having experienced it, we may fear the very idea of being crushed beyond our own strength to recover from.

But the fact is God is the safety net, if only we don’t despise God because of it, or run in any manner of denial away from God into the clutches of a million worldly distractions.

We must engage in the third way which is to make peace with ourselves and God knowing that God endeavours to make peace with us.  Indeed, finally we realise the depth and gravity that, in Jesus, God has made peace with us, and we’re just a little late getting to the party.

Hardly ever do we realise when our world has caved in and our hope has disappeared and all the purpose from our life has been sucked out of us, that this is the way to life, that God’s mercy has opened the narrow gateway to us, even though it feels like everything has closed down.

Never would we have ever considered that the worst thing that could happen to us in life could actually become the catalyst for the best thing ever — truer knowledge of the operational power of God in our suffering.  If only we respond the right way, which is faith, and time and time again, which is faithfulness.

The right response is actually easier than we could ever imagine, but it does require an enormous amount of humility, which is possible for any of us, one day at a time, to not endeavour to fight our way out of things, and to resist the temptation to flee.

The truer knowledge of the power of God — the experience of it as a real phenomenon working in our lives — comes only when all our own resources become futile and our strength has failed.  But it’s not just that; out of a required paucity of spirit, when we finally debunked our wilfulness, comes the wisdom to deploy the resources we had inside us all along, with power, through God.

Of course, there’s a process of time involved in all this, because God won’t/can’t lift us out of our circumstances, but God will certainly refine us through our calamities, as we learn new ways of responding through a dependence that is easier — for God is all we have left.

None of this is saying it’s easy to do.  It will be the hardest thing you ever do.  But not only is it possible, you will come to realise, you were born and made for a time like this.

Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz on Unsplash