Ordained Suffering

What does it mean that I serve a God who ordains suffering?  Who has and will ordain suffering in my life?  This isn’t exactly a message that has been preached at many of the churches I’ve attended.  I can’t say it’s something we spend a lot of time talking about in small groups or Bible studies.  Oh, I know that I serve a God who makes “all things work together for my good.”  It’s easy to name and claim that one.  And it’s true: I serve a warrior God, one who rises up and defends me.  He fights my battles and shelters me under His wing.  But He also ordains suffering in my life… sometimes He simply stays with me through the storm, instead of simply commanding it to cease.  Often I must fight my own battles.  While I know he could rise to my defense for every storm or pain or struggle that came my way and rid of it, He chooses not to.  He chooses not to.

He promises that all things work together for my good.  He promises that He only has the best for me.  Yet He allows and sometimes brings suffering into my life.  My flesh imagines this to be a contradiction, that somehow by “good” and “best” He must mean “easy” and “painless.”  But not true!  His ways are higher and greater than mine, and I deny His sovereignty when I limit His plans to my minute understanding.  We are never promised that life would be easy or that our struggles and issues and problems in this world would be erased once we chose to follow Him.  In fact, it’s the opposite.  We are told that we will have trouble, that we will be hated by the world (as Jesus was).  Are we promised joy and peace regardless of how crappy life gets? Yes.  Provision?  Absolutely.  God promises to be our portion… enough to sustain us.  He does not promise a lifetime of abundance or wealth or perfect health.  He promises to sustain, to be our portion and our delight.

What does this mean for me in this moment?  It means that right now, He would rather I be devastatingly lonely but fully His.  He wants me to run to His heart first.  If that means that He must block my other go-to’s, He will.  Like in Hosea, where God says that He will draw His bride to the desert, that He will block her preferred paths with thorn bushes.  The dessert is certainly not a place of abundance.  I imagine it is a place of misery, of never being able to escape the heat, being desperate for water, and exhausted.  Yet God says this is where His bride will remember Him and turn to Him, where she will realize that all of her good things come from Him.  She will renew her love and give herself to Him… in the desert.  Not in the most beautiful room of an exotic palace.  Not a cozy, comfy location where abundance abounds.  No, her love is most focused on her God when she is in a place of desperation and suffering.  Does He leave her there?  Certainly not.  But our God knows that lessons are learned in the desert.  That sometimes my heart only listens when I’m alone and desperate and all my options and other gods have been exhausted.  So why would I ever refuse the honor of pursuing His best for me – even if that includes suffering – by rebuking all the troubles and pain and suffering I’m faced with in this world?  Being lonely hurts.  It sucks.  But here, in this broken place, is where I’ve realized (again) that He is the only place my restless heart finds rest.  That I’m dying for something more and not finding it.  That the love I’m looking for is not to be found on this earth, not outside of His hand.  His exposure of the things I pursue for fulfillment hurts.  It’s disappointing and painful and terrifying.  But He would prefer that I have an aching heart that is His than a blindly content heart that is broken in its pursuit of things other than Him.  He doesn’t take the pain away.  Or provide all the answers.  I serve a God who is much more interested in making me fully His that in my comfort.  Yet in the pursuit of being fully His, I will find my portion, my delight, my hope.  That is what I want.  More than I want a cush life devoid of struggles, more than I want the desires of my heart, I want to find in Him my portion.  To live knowing that simply He is enough.  I don’t know that yet.  It’s easy to say, but I haven’t learned to make it one of the deep convictions of my heart.

You, my Lord, are amazing.  It baffles my mind to think of some of the many things You are to me:  loving, warrior, defender, joy, peace, hope, delight, rest, suffering ordain-er.  I want whatever you have for me.  Including the parts that are painful and scary because I know that You are better than anything I could come up with by myself.  

“Your love tears me up and when it’s done puts me back together

Your love calls me out of my death and my failure…”