By permission I share a string of recent events that have happened to my daughter this past month:
- Pulled over for speeding on her way back to college after the Christmas break and ended up with her car empounded for an expired tag. Being MLK Day the tag agency was closed so she was stuck overnight in a different town before arriving a day late at school.
- Incurred the costs from above – ticket, fines and tow yard.
- Experienced a break-up.
- Freaked out with fear from being followed while running at a lake. (Ladies, don’t go running alone in semi-secluded places!)
- Suffered severe abdominal pain that led to a visit to the campus health clinic and a diagnosis of a viral infection.
- Dropped and broke her phone. Thankfully under warranty. But the flip side is only the Apple store can handle warranties and there is not an Apple store where she goes to school, which means she had to mail her phone in and temporarily be without one.
- Disappointed over certain thought summer plans.
- Bombed a math test.
Day by day our theology matters because this is where the rubber meets road. What we really believe about God (not necessarily what we say we believe) will come out in the way we handle life. So considering the adversities listed above any of us might be tempted to ask Why?
- Why me?
- What did I do deserve this?
- Is God punishing me?
- Does God not care about me?
- Haven’t I been through enough already?
But what this self-talk reveals is a wrong way of relating to God. He is not like us. He does not give or take away based on anything we do. Being “good” does not earn us greater blessing, just as being “bad” does not guarantee trials. Yes, natural consequences may stem from our sin, but God does not pay evil for evil, love us less, or require that we act or prove our worth in any way when we are in him.
When we live like our actions determine his, we will live as if we are god. And this makes our theology hard to reconcile when we think we’ve done everything right and still suffer.
To get our story straight, we have to see ourselves rightly before God. Because, if we ever think we deserve anything from God at all, we don’t understand our sin or his grace. The reality is we are eternally condemned by our sin – and sin is not just the outward behavioral stuff, but the internal; the thoughts, the pride, the covetousness.
We really don’t want what we deserve.
Our only hope is grace. And God gives it abundanly to us though we absolutely don’t deserve it.
By giving us grace, God gives us Christ’s record of perfect performance. That means he now sees us as he sees his Son – holy and righteous. When that is true, we are no longer condemned by sin, or you could say, no longer treated according to what our sin deserves. Therefore, we can’t look at trials – ours or someone elses – and link it to anything other than God’s word says we will experience suffering and trials in this fallen world because in it is not our hope or home. But he doesn’t leave us there. He promises to enter in with us, and he can because he left his home to experience all that we do so he can identify with us.
How we interpret what happens to us and all around us will look different when seen through the lenses of the gospel and his grace. It won’t necessarily answer the why but it will move us to Who. So whether its a string of bad “luck” or life-altering circumstances, who Jesus is for us is God’s guarantee that nothing will separate us from his love.
Spontaneous meet up in the middle of all the mess for a mom hug.
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