I wanted to write a really nice blog on “sanctification” right now, but I realized 2 paragraphs in that I am in no place to be discussing it. My heart and mind are a bit distracted and that’s the honest truth. I can however say that if somehow I believed that the Christian life was going to be a cakewalk, then I have sorely deceived myself.
Last week on NBC I watched a two day special on a two families who were basically a part of this huge case of mistaken identity. The gist is that each family had a daughter in this huge car accident that were near in age. Apparently the coroner made a mistake and one daughter was pronounced dead and the other was in a coma. The problem was, each family had the wrong daughter. Essentially this meant that one family got news of their daughters death and the other stayed at the bedside of their daughter was in a coma. Five weeks in to the ordeal the girl in a coma came out of it and they asked what her name was and it wasn’t what the family expected. To make a long story short, the families realized that a mistake had been made and the girl who was now alive was reunited with her real family and the other family found out their daughter had died five weeks earlier.
That story could easily be the saddest thing to hear, but what amazed me more than anything about the whole ordeal was the attitudes of both families. In the middle of the interview Matt Lauer asked both familes this question, he said, “Where’s the anger?”. He was implying that he didn’t understand why both families weren’t more upset at the situation they were put in. But it was the response of one of the father’s the blew me away. One of the dad’s said something along the lines of, “Well Matt, we believe in a sovereign God. We knew that we would see our daughter once again, if not right now, and though our faith is meager, we trust God with our lives.”
That dad’s heart is in the right place. He has a truly biblical understanding about who God is, and it’s possible that the Lord was able to reveal this to him only because of the situation that God had allowed to happen in their lives. You see, as I think about why “bad things happen to good people” (AKA: the problem of evil), I can’t get passed that one of the main reasons is for God to reveal more of Himself to you. For these families, God was revealing something about His character that they may never have learned or seen before unless this happened to them.
2 replies on “Troughs and Peaks”
good post buddy. it’s a great reminder that God doesn’t promise “our best life now”, but that the life now will be hard. the best life is still to come, and i hope eventually i will be able to live that way.
That was good