Day 3019 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Lamentations 3:32 NIV

There's a blatant duality to our God that sparks many a great misunderstanding and potentially grave confusion unto those who assume either to be the complete depiction of His existence.

However, much to our dismay, God has been described by many for quite some time as a being of immense, endless, entirely undeserved love. And He is. He is the very epitome of love and all that love entails and offers. He is kindness in its most perfect form, as He indeed authored what kindness even is. So it stands to somewhat good reason that so much has been shared of His merciful and provisional nature.

But the danger in focusing on merely half of God is that it instills an expectation that renders people ill-prepared for their inevitable encountering of the part that few like to talk about. All of these messages aimed exclusively at His kindness shared at the expense of acknowledging His justice are creating in many a faith that assumes this path to be free from hardship, trial, confusion, pain, loss, surrender or any other experience that runs counter to our often too high expectations.

Indeed, our ideal of life would find us never shaken, never lacking, never uncertain. We’d happily abide our dream of a peaceful stream of ease flowing seamlessly from this life into the next. We would love to have our way, because our way always sees us winning and never once losing a thing we don’t wish to leave behind. But in that ideal we'd fail to find the necessity of the hardships which help us to both better see and finally feel the fullness of His faithfulness.

The reality is that there will be days along this road that seem to bring us very little peace, prosperity, even a moment's rest from the woes inevitable in a worldly life. And so to teach people to assume on God's kindness without ever making them aware of the guarantee of hardship is not only a failure to uphold the truth He's given us, but it's a failure to shepherd whatever flock may be looking or listening.

Because one of the most commonly missed of all God's blessings is to see the beauty that comes out of pain. To miss the value of a reward given to a faith that withstands a season of torment is a truly sad thing that is incredibly too frequent when souls are tied to this idea that God is only love, only blessing, only peace, only promise, only joy. He is, again, very much the very embodiment of all the above. But friends, He is so very much more than merely all the above.

I'll give you a personal example that I myself was given the chance to realize over the last couple of days.

For quite a few years, not too far back, I spent a great deal of time wrestling with this sudden lack of friendship in my life. Growing up it seemed that I was friends with everyone. In hindsight, it was likely just a product of normal life and the ongoing opportunities to retain those relationships offered in the hours and months spent surrounded by people my own age as we went to the same school, lived in the same neighborhood, worked at the same first jobs. But still, friendship to me has always been a very deep and valuable thing.

So valuable in fact that it left me incredibly confused when one day I looked up and saw all these people I once knew having gone, leaving me with only a lot of time spent wondering what I'd done wrong. What could I have done differently? Should I have tried harder to force those ties to remain tied? Is there something I said or did that caused so many to flee among so many varying paths that all led to me with none of what I thought I'd always have at least a little left?

But then my family and I drove to this neighborhood in the town where we live in our ongoing search for a way to get out of this blasted apartment complex. This neighborhood is one that I'd visited long ago, accompanied by a couple of those friends I thought I'd always have. Only, this time there was a much different reason for the visit.

All those years ago, I went with those friends to this neighborhood as it was being built and well, we did stupid teenage things that stupid teenagers do. Tipping over porta-potties standing at the construction sites of these homes being built. Hiding road-cones and different signs that had been put out around the area. Tearing up some small things and just your general unleashing of a young person's energy in a completely foolish way.

And as I sat there looking around at this place I'd been once before, I was given the chance to realize that my eyes were seeing life differently than they did on that night all those years past. My reason for being there was different. My company while there was different. My life is indescribably different. And in that realization, I finally found the answer to those questions that had long plagued my mind in the wake of watching everyone I knew turn into the strangers they'd always been.

I didn’t lose them, and they didn’t leave me. He stepped in. He took those influences out of my life, not to leave me lonely, not to impart voids in my life, but to save me from who I could have been had I kept following those same people that I'd followed that night. He led me away from a path wider than I needed to be following. And yet, as a kid I couldn't see that. I only saw that He'd taken away all the friends I'd tried so hard to hold onto. I only saw the emptiness where there was once fun and frivolity. I only saw what was missing.

And that's what happens when we think God exists only to keep our lives filled the way we're used to them being filled. We expect things to remain unchanged. We assume the blessings we're accustomed to will keep showing up without fail. We grow into this entitlement that tells us our lives should never lack, that we should never hurt, that nothing we want should ever be lost or taken.

In those assumptions of incredible arrogance, we find God not being given the honor and gratitude He deserves, because we become convinced that the work He's doing involves things that we don't think we deserve.

We don't want to lose friends. We don't want to lose jobs. We don't want to miss out on experiencing the fullness of our every dream and desire. We don't want to get rid of things that the world's convinced us are worth our attention. We don't want to go through seasons of pain and torment because we know that peace and comfort are so much easier. We don't want life to be hard, to be challenging, to be painful at times and seemingly empty at others.

We just want God to be kindness, love, mercy, a being overflowing with the blessings we've chosen from the list we've given Him.

But when it comes time for God to be our Father, the Father who rebukes, the Father who removes, the Father who refuses to settle for what we think is best, we balk. We question. We get angry and let our tempers rage against His sudden failure to be what we want Him to be in light of our expectations of life's endless ease and victory. We slap away the hand that's just trying to lead us toward something better that we can't see as being better because we remain blinded by what we think is already good enough.

Friends, He's not a God of good enough. He's not a God of compromise. He's a God who will complete the good work He began in our lives, even if it means turning these lives upside down and shaking them free of everything we've collected in our selfish attempts to make them look like, feel like, sound like, go like, stay like we want them to be. He's a God who will do what needs to be done, not merely what we want Him to do.

But if we're never told that, then we'll never know how to see the blessings hidden behind the trials He brings into our lives to bring our lives closer to Him.

It's an unspeakably amazing gift to live long enough to see your questions and regrets become the blessings He planted in those seasons of endless rain.

He brings grief to teach us His compassion. He allows pain so we'll experience His healing. He sends storms to encourage us into His shelter. His calamities illuminate His love in ways that a life of endless peace and prosperity never could. And for us to miss that, or to cause others to miss that because of this breaking God in half to better appease our assumptions is among the greatest failures that we're able to bring upon ourselves.

There will be things that He does that we don't understand at the time. There will be days when the clouds refuse to let the sunshine warm up our faces. There will be moments when all we wanted life to be will be gone. But we have to stop letting those moments steal away our trust and our hope and our faith and our belief that He really is working all things for our good.

And that's the point that we miss in that verse so widely known and often memorized. The things He's working are for our good, but it is still His work. It's His plan. It's His path. It's His design unfolded in His time. Not ours. It's not our work. It's not our plans. It's not our dreams, our goals, our maps. It's His. He's doing the good work to bring about the good He's always had planned for us. But sometimes construction requires tearing down things that won't work, won't fit, won't hold up in the end.

As for me, I'm thankful to have been given the chance to find this appreciation of a new life void of all that I once had. Because the less I have here, the more I now know I have in Him. And that He saw fit to drag me kicking and screaming off that path I was once following others down is a gift I can't imagine having missed. Because while I don't have all the friendships around me that I once had, I now know that I wouldn't be who I am today if I did.

And I wouldn't trade this life for the old, because I can see that I'd tapped all the potential those old ways had to offer. But this new life, it's filled with days that I get to spend shaking dust and serving something bigger than myself.

Friends, we have to understand the fullness of God, because until we do our faith cannot grow. In fact, until we understand the fullness of God, our faith cannot exist. Because it's easy to walk by faith when it seems we're holding the map. But it's a whole new kind of faith when that map is set on fire while we're led blindfolded into a dust storm raging across the barren desert in a direction we've never gone before away from all that we've always known and always hoped to have around.

He will bring grief, and for that we should be indescribably thankful. Because His grief perfects His peace. And we can't have one without the other, at least not in the fullness they're meant to be. We may prefer it another way, but honestly, our preferences are pretty much always aimed at giving us all we want while requiring as little as we’re willing to give. And while we may want God to just give us our blessings, there’s another story of a young man who squandered all he had and was left returning home with his held hung low in shame.

In the end, life’s biggest prizes aren’t the days that unfold with all the peace our complacent hearts can desire. No, in reality, one of the biggest gifts is to reach a place where you’re finally able to be fully thankful for the miseries of life, because you finally realize they’re there to help us find Him.

So many times we find ourselves angry over the things of this life He asks us to lose. But I think that anger or disappointment is just a mask we’re using to hide the shame found in our hesitation of letting go the things He tells us cannot compare to what He’s promised in return for our faithful trust that allows us to walk to the edge of all we’d hoped to keep and jump into the promise of something bigger than we can imagine that waits just beyond our willingness to let go.

Indeed, let us not lament the trials found aplenty in life. Let us rather lament that we so often face them with such a mix of doubt and hesitancy that simply shouldn’t be accepted in our faith.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold