On a cork board in our office at home, we have this quote tacked so that every time we walk in we will see it. It is the constant reminder that all of us, regardless of background, will at some point feel as though we are experiencing "hell on earth." It is also a reminder that regardless of how hellish it may get, we have to keep moving.
Never become stagnant.
The mission Christ has given us as his followers mandates that we keep moving. Even if we stay in one place, we are meant to bloom. We are meant to affect the world around us with the glory of the Lord.
That's the beauty of the Gospel of Christ. That's why I love Him.
God takes broken, messy, damaged people and heals them so that He can use them as a testimony, a showcase of you will, of how good and beautiful our God truly is.
If we look at Job, we see a man who at the beginning and the end of the story is righteous before God. We see, if we only read the first and last of the story, that Job was a man who God blessed plentifully and used to show his goodness through. But what do we miss with the skewed perspective?
We miss the storm. We miss the picture of a man, just like us, who loses everything he holds dear. He lost everything that we today would use to identity him. He loses so much, that now that loss of everything and the following conversation he had with God become his identifiers.
It's shocking at moments to read Job's words when he is in the center of the storm: "“May the day of my birth perish, and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’ That day—may it turn to darkness; may God above not care about it; may no light shine on it." (Job 3:3-4 NIV)
Talk about depression in the storm! But we sound exactly the same at moments. Let me modernize this for you:
"I wish I'd never been born. I wish I could die. Things couldn't get any worse. My life is over."
Sound familiar?
Then, a real physical storm comes (after over 30 chapters of Job and his friends going back and forth) and God sets the record straight. In short, God takes Job back to size, helping him realize that God is so much greater than the trouble Job had faced. Once Job gets his perspective back, God blesses him and after the storm Job's life is better than it was before.
In Matthew 8 we see Jesus perform more miracles than we can count. Seriously, the writer actually uses the word "many" instead of listing each one. We're talking healing of leaprosy, sickness, casting out of demons and at least two people who were close to death being brought back to the land of the living. After all this we see the picture of a would be follower: one to whom Christ makes it clear that if he wants to follow Christ he has to leave everything behind.
Finally we get to the storm in this story. After all the miracles and the short conversation with the follower, Christ and His disciples get on a boat. Christ goes to sleep. Such a good sleep that when a storm that makes the disciples think they are going to die, Jesus doesn't even wake up.
As I envision this storm I imagine Jesus not so much as wiping the sleep from His eyes as He stands and rebukes the storm. Everything becomes calm. Jesus made it clear to them that with faith there is no reason to fear any storm.
Remember what Joseph said, "What you meant for evil, God has made it good"?
That's what God does through the storms of our lives.
There is no such thing as a pointless storm.
Every trial that we face is a step toward something.
We may no feel like we're moving intentionally. It may feel as though we are being thrown about by life, but it is to propel us to something. Whether it be to a lesson learned or a place we need to go or even a place we need to get away from.
Every storm has its purpose.
Always know, in every storm that God is a refuge and the One who speaks from the storm.
Blessings.
No comments:
Post a Comment