Why was I born into this family? Why all these dysfunction? Why is my Dad dead? Why do I struggle so much with my mental health? Why did this happen and why did that happen?… and the lists of why’s goes on and on and on…
There are experiences in life that has scared me, scars inflicted by myself and scars inflicted by others. There were many things I saw happening when I growing up and there are times I thought to myself why God couldn’t stop them from happening. Instead of God preventing it, it looked like He was moving to make it happen. I was tired of looking for the good in the bad, I just wanted everything to end, the pain should stop.
As I have grown, in every of the instances where I felt alone or abandoned, when I look at it in hindsight I see how God’s hand was working all along.
Like Paul said…
Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. — Romans 5:3-5
When my mum said those thing to me and I was hurt by them, perhaps God was teaching me to forgive and love unconditionally. When I lost my Dad, I became like Jacob, learning to limp and lean upon the staff that comforts me. When I was battling deeply with depression I was learning to trust God with my emotions. My service and love to Him were rarely based on how I felt, I just loved and trusted Him. I learnt to love Him . Many other circumstances I look back at now and see what God was doing and many others that I have no clue and I’m still lost on His plans.
Maybe this entry is not about “Forgiving God” it’s about “Trusting God”.
In the words of C.S Lewis…
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
Like Lysa Terkeurst said “We see a cottage. God sees a palace. We see destruction. God sees construction. We see only what the human mind can imagine. God is building something we cannot even fathom”.
God does not need to be forgiven, but sometimes in the middle of our deep hurt, our hearts can start to wrongly believe that God is at fault. I’ve come to believe that God is always the protagonist in my story and never the other way round.
Here’s the analogy I’d use to round off… who likes watching movies here? Sometimes I do. But I have this believe that movie time is relaxation time so I don’t like to watch movies that are terrifying, or with some sort of suspense. I really want to relax and laugh when it’s movie time. Hence most times you would catch me chilling with a show.
Imagine that I was to watch an action movie with you [ remember that I don’t like action movies ] and I get so worked up in the middle about something not going right. Meanwhile, you’ve watched the movie and you’re so calm and you know that in the end everything worked out fine. Perhaps at the scene where I was scared, someone actually died, but because you’ve watched that movie, you know how the story pans out, it was not all doom and gloom. So you remain calm. This is because you know the begining to the end of the story.
How much more God who is the author and the finisher of our faith. He is writing your story. He is writing my story and day by day I’m learning to trust Him with it.
God hasn’t wronged me. He hasn’t sinned. I was just looking at the hardest places and thinking it was the end. I missed something so important. Something I now see. What things look like from an earthly perspective God sees differently.
I kept seeing what I lost, the damage, the hurt, the pain. I was blinded to the fact that I don’t know all there is, what’s really best and what is not. And though the days were awful, I was not without God.
So today, I look at what’s right in front of me through what I know to be true about God. This is a gift. This can be used for good. This is somehow part of a much bigger story. And I can trust Him to also make it beautiful. Now, I just have to keep making the choice to look for the beautiful.
— Lysa Terkeurst
That’s all for now, see you in my next entry….
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