Hope for the Anguished, the Aggrieved, and the Aggressed

When you’ve suffered in life, and you don’t know what response will work, because every response so far has seen you strike out, there is still one response to try: a decidedly spiritual response.

At this point, try to unknow what you know, try to ignore everything that comes up as a reaction, and try to be open to that which seems foreign.  But do all this without trying.

These ideas only make sense in the spiritual realm.

Stay with me because what I’m suggesting works, and it’s possibly the only thing you can do to make sense of where you’re at.  We only reject this because we’re so inculcated in the world’s way of dealing with pain.

But the world’s way doesn’t work; it only increases the pain.

When you’re living a life where hope faded long ago, or perhaps the impossibility of your situation is only just now dawning on you, it makes sense to reach out and try something different.

You know how it is.  You’ve tried a particular formula for responding to certain situations.  The formula has always seemed right and just.  But years down the track you’re sensing it hasn’t taken you far—not as far as you’d have hoped.  Perhaps you realise it’s taken you nowhere.

Welcome to the place you’ve been drawn to by your experiences.  Here it is.

Every hurt you’re carrying, every grief, every heartache and broken dream, and especially everything that seems more unfair than it ever should have been—you know, those losses that cannot ever be recovered—are the KEY to this method.  That’s right.

This is where God comes in.
Some of you may think, “Well, you’re losing me.”
Just wait a second.

God’s not allowing suffering for any other reason than this:

Every flickering, prevailing trigger,
every unmistakable regret,
every painful moment you bear,
every horrendous reminder you cannot deny,
every nudge of enduring dread,
every reality that is too hard to stomach,
every single one no matter how insignificant,
especially in every impossible situation,
... is a debt we don’t owe,
and we transfer it to God.

Pain is a debt we don’t owe, because whether we caused our own pain or not, we, in and of ourselves, are totally ill-equipped to deal with it in the world’s way.  There’s only one method that works.  God knows how frail we are, and what trauma does to us.

Pain and trauma herald the need of God.  Nothing else works.

This is to go beyond the pains of past and choose for intangible blessings—they never fail and they’re always there.  Something the world cannot give, but that which only God can.

Suffering is the invitation into the only thing that will make sense of it—the spiritual.

Suffering is something the world and tangible and material things cannot touch.

Suffering is a doorway, and if only we’ll take the ridiculous risk of walking through it, we’ll find there’s another way to a far deeper life that is ordinarily totally hidden from us.

But in the spiritual, suffering finds its way to peace, and such a thing cannot be conquered.

This is not quackery, or a lie, or anything else that it’s not.  This is the most resonating truth of all.

You may still think this is madness.  Simply give up everything you can’t keep and embrace everything you cannot lose.  Then you see with the eyes of your heart what you can never unsee.

This truth will hold you in correct stead all your life long, so long as you don’t pick up and grasp and hanker over the world, the tangible, the material things—things we covet.

By faith, there’s nothing that can be taken from any of us that, in God, won’t be given back.  In transferring every debt life owes us to God—and God knows every single one of them—God saves them up for us and enlarges our eternal account accordingly.  Again, by faith.

How can we know this?

Think about these things that are by faith self-evident truths:

Life is real, and life is hard,
God is good, and God is a guard,
Pain is certain, and pain is torrid,
The way is spiritual when life is horrid.

I can do nothing about those who won’t hear this message spoken through the truth of reality throughout eternity.

Peace is possible in pain as we release our losses to God by a trust that every grief will be redeemed.  Because they are.