WHEN YOUR LIFE AND TIMES ARE IN THE HANDS OF GOD

In Chapter seventeen of book Three in The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis a conversation takes place between Jesus and a disciple.

Jesus says:  MY CHILD, allow me to do what I will with you. I know what is best for you. You think as a man; you feel in many things as human affection persuades.
 The Disciple says:  Lord, what You say is true. Your care for me is greater than all the care I can take of myself. For he who does not cast all his care upon You stands very unsafely. If only my will remain right and firm toward You, Lord, do with me whatever pleases You. For whatever You shall do with me can only be good.  If You wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless You. And if You wish me to be in light, again I shall bless You. If You stoop down to comfort me, I shall bless You, and if You wish me to be afflicted, I shall bless You forever.
 Jesus says:  My child, this is the disposition which you should have if you wish to walk with Me. You should be as ready to suffer as to enjoy. You should as willingly be destitute and poor as rich and satisfied.
 The Disciple Says: O Lord, I shall suffer willingly for Your sake whatever You wish to send me. I am ready to accept from Your hand both good and evil alike, the sweet and the bitter together, sorrow with joy; and for all that happens to me I am grateful. Keep me from all sin and I will fear neither death nor hell. Do not cast me out forever nor blot me out of the Book of Life, and whatever tribulation befalls will not harm me.

Can we trust ourselves to God that way?  Can we let everything go to God, and with a spirit of release embrace the story that comes to us?  Does God have to bless us to get our affection?  Does God have to "come through every time" for us to accept that He is here?  Maybe I should personalize this a bit.  Can I let everything go to God that way?  Does God always have to be satisfying me in order to gain my love? 

à Kempis makes me think of Habakkuk of old, who confessed to God, "Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, although there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.  The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of the deer, en enables me to tread on the heights" (Habakkuk 3:17-19, NIV).

You know, there are times when life just doesn't make sense.  Pain trumps the day.  Chaos trumps the order.  Evil wins, and mocks the very thought of good.  There's not enough money.  Health suffers.  Relationships remain broken.  Everything that can fall apart falls apart.  If it can go wrong, it does. 

What do we do when life hits us in the emotional sternum and leaves us writhing in pain?  Gripe at God?  Run away from God?  Curse the day we were born?  Many do.  Habakkuk didn't.  When life could not get much worse, Habakkuk rejoiced in His God.  Chose to be joyful in the face of the grief.  Found God's strength in his story, and embraced the fact that even in the mystery God was still God, and that, in the rough and hostile environment of an ugly mountain, he still had the agility of a deer treading on the heights.

It doesn't make sense.  Faith doesn't, I suppose.  Or, maybe, faith is the only thing that makes sense when things are falling apart.  And, truth is, things are falling apart most of the time in our world, aren't they?   How shall we live?  What shall we do?  How shall we survive?  How do we be Christian when everything around us calls our faith into question?  How do we go forward when every step is a challenge of mammoth proportions.

In his book, You Gotta Keep Dancin' (David C. Cook, 1985) Tim Hansel writes of faith in crucible when he wrote,

Most of the Psalms were born in difficulty. Most of the Epistles were written in prisons. Most of the greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers of all time had to pass through the fire. Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress from jail. Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed, reorganized the hospitals of England. Semi paralyzed and under the constant menace of apoplexy, Pasteur was tireless in his attack on disease. During the greater part of his life, American historian Francis Parkman suffered so acutely that he could not work for more than five minutes as a time. His eyesight was so wretched that he could scrawl only a few gigantic words on a manuscript, yet he contrived to write twenty magnificent volumes of history.

Sometimes it seems that when God is about to make preeminent use of a man, he puts him through the fire.

I'm not smart enough to know how to read every situation that comes down the pike but I do know that life does not have to do us in.  The God who held Habakkuk together is still present, this time in the resurrection power of Jesus Christ.  Our days are held in the arms of grace, and the dark night is filled with the light of Jesus.  Don't give in.  Look up.  Jesus is Lord.  Maybe the prayer of our heart, when life is perplexing, confusing, and painful, be the prayer of à Kempis, " I shall bless You forever."  Better yet, may our prayer be that of Habakkuk, " I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior."

It's not necessarily easy; but who said faith was easy?  It is reality, though, when your life and times are in the hands of God.