Why are so many Christians fighting a bitter war with disappointment? When life gets hard, why is the reaction one of hurt, anger, and soul crushing despair? Cancer, death, sickness and disease, mental illness, divorce, addiction are all the reality of this world.  Why are we so surprised?  Intellectually, we know it happens, we know it’s real, but when life altering pain and suffering strikes one of “ours”, or it becomes “our” reality (instead of the abstract reality of “out there somewhere”), we act like life is so unfair and “how could this happen to me” becomes our mantra.
We cry out to God and others in our pain, and all too quickly begin to question our faith, our God, and we let our core beliefs be shaken, broken, and sometimes shattered beyond repair.
I have to admit, as someone raised in the church, I lay some of the blame there. I never heard much about suffering when I was growing up, except for Christ suffering for me. And His suffering was so I could have eternal life, which seemed like a pretty good trade from my perspective. Christ suffered, I get salvation, life is good. Thanks be to God for grace and mercy and healing and peace that passes understanding and kindness and gentleness and all that.

Except that’s not the whole story. The rest of the story is that life is hard, painful, and we all die in the end.  But as Christians, we have focused so much on the blessings of being of Christian, we are simply stunned at life’s painful, ugly reality.  It’s like we know that one side of the coin has beauty, grace, and mercy.  We’ll call that side of the coin heads.  And every day, we wake up, flip the coin, and expect to see heads.  We expect life to be good, after all, we are Christians, and God loves us, and He wants us to be happy.  Right?  And for most of us, life is heads most every day.

But one day, we flip the coin, and we get tails.   Wait, that’s not right.  Hey God, hear my prayer, I want heads tomorrow, take this away from me.  It’s not fair, I’m supposed to get heads.  I’m claiming healing and mercy.  And I’m talking about now.  Hear me Lord?

What happens to our faith when tails comes up every day for week, a month, a year.  What happens to us when we don’t get what we expect, or when we don’t get what we think we deserve.  When the  cancer doesn’t go away after chemo.  Instead, it metastasizes.  When the pain after the wreck won’t go away.  Maybe ever.  What then?  Simple, we get angry.  We doubt, we nose dive in our faith.  We get depressed.  We wonder where God is in our suffering.  How could this happen to me or my loved one?  God, where are You?

What we rarely do is dive deeper into our faith.  We of all people should know that suffering is part of life, it’s God ordained, it has a purpose.   God is still El Shaddai, the Lord God Almighty.
Take a look at 2 Cor 4. Read the whole chapter, but for now,  focus on 4:7-9 and 4:16-18. Paul says we have this treasure (the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ) in jars of clay. So our bodies are jars of clay, which is a pretty fragile container compared to jars of stone for example. He says we are “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed.
That cuts to the heart of our issue. Somehow, we believe that we DONT deserve to have bad, horrible, tragic, and life altering things happen to us. Why? Perhaps because we have not chosen to really understand our relationship with Christ and through Him, our relationship with God. Somehow, we expect that everything will go according to our plan. Yes, we expect it to go according to “our” plan.
Paul goes on to say that we do not lose heart. That these “light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all”. And then he tells us that we are to “fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”  This is coming from a man who had been stoned and left for dead, been whipped 5 times, and each time was whipped the maximum number of times allowed to a Roman citizen (39 lashes).   He was beaten with rods 3 times, shipwrecked 3 times, in constant danger, thrown in prison several times, known hunger, gone cold and naked.  All while serving God as His apostle.
Paul serves as a stark reminder that we have lost our perspective completely when we fix our eyes on anything we can see, including the suffering and pain of this life.

My challenge is the same as yours in this life. Will I fix my eyes on Christ and His kingdom, or will I look around me?  Paul’s perspective was that literally nothing that happens to us on earth matters, and in fact, these troubles are achieving for us eternal glory.
That leads me to think about my relationship with Christ, and my expectations of that relationship. Next time.
Grace and Peace