There's joy, you know?
There's joy, and grace, love is slipping in and out of waves. Bobbing up, tumbling down, scaling peaks, riding out valleys.
Do hard times of life overshadow God's goodness? Does feeling inside out and raw and confused and grating pain, pain, pain take away from the magnificence of the King?
Once upon a time, I had a professor, who had a son my age, who went to engineering school, who was diagnosed with a rare cancer, who fought a hard fight filled with remission and regression and tumors and needles and medication that makes you so sick you'd wonder what was killing you-the cancer or the cure.
And his son-this boy-he died.
He died, after he went into remission and surgery was successful and guards were down and it seemed that relief had come.
And in an email sent to my professor expressing remorse and sorrow over loss, I received a reply-"We have hope for the future because we trust in God. It is our hope in the resurrection that really helps us deal with this. God is Faithful and Good."
He is Faithful and Good, words not synonymous with appeasing and conforming-what we tend to think God should do when we pray. As if prayer is doing God a favor. Painful crises in our lives seem to come when life's circumstances and our idea of God do not intersect-God breaks out of parameters we set for Him.
And as our picture of God is shattered, as we apply our human logic to our life; we come to conclusions that shout God is not good, God is not real, God is a human construction to assist the mind in coping with life and sate the search for personal meaning.
Yes. Most certainly this is true. Most people's god is a construction. And most people's god cannot stand under the weight both truth and life carry. The problem with a god you can completely understand is that life is not completely understandable in any capacity.
Perhaps the words God uses to refer to Himself may only be defined by God Himself. Maybe human definitions are too weak, too small, to address infinity.
Following Jesus may sound pragmatically easy-accept the sovereignty of God as the answer to all questions. But pain barrels through pragmatism in an awful, ushering trumpeting whirlwind, and in the face of onslaught, logic puts on a dunce hat; takes a corner seat. Pour your life and hope and blood into the good fight and come out with wounds and scars and then tell us about how immaculate a life of obedience is.
But there is a hard learned secret that no one but experience explains to you:
God's sovereignty is both the pain and the joy. His sovereignty is both the wounding and the grace. There's pain in realizing that this life is a passing thing, there's pain in losses that are goodbyes that it seems we were not created to say. But joy comes because morning brings hope-hope that lies in something greater. Something more sovereign than circumstance.
There's gaping wounds left when things of this life that are shadows of what is to come are taken-but the grace is in the taking. How can we receive permanent if we do not lose temporary?
Perhaps, then, the only response is submission to sovereignty-not a submission that mitigates the pain or the suffering, but a submission that acknowledges that God is who He says He is, more than you can ever hope to begin to comprehend. Pain may be the root of cynicism and bitterness if you so choose, or it may be a reminder. It may be the reminder of hope-hope in the glory of God that does not put us to shame and is the basis for faith's substance. It may be the source of thankfulness-for the grace and joy present in our lives that only true perspective has the privilege to see.
Hard times and pain don't have to challenge joy-they can reveal it if you let them.
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