I don’t know how well you know me but if we were to have some deep coffee convo right now, you would find out that my current season of life has not been one of my favorites. It has caused a lot of questions to rise back up in my spirit that I thought God and I had already dealt with. I have spent months questioning the Lord about why it felt like I was not able to take steps forward into a new season but we were still stuck in this. And it was not until recently that the Lord told me He had brought me here to do a deep work in me. Because that sounded fun.
The thing is though, it was not until I felt my heart soften to look for where God was in this season though that He said those words to me. I have spent the last four months mourning over a promise that I thought was lost because things were not looking like what I thought they would by now and honestly, things turned out really painfully. So I mourned not because God walked away from the promise but because I had started to.
But the Lord is truly sweet. Because He never chastised me for my pain. He allowed time to process what I believed to be loss and continued to whisper purpose into my heart even when I was too scared to hold onto that hope. But as time went on and that pain was less at the forefront, I began to start asking God where He was in all that was happening around me and how I could give Him room to move. And it wasn’t until I started intently focusing on those questions that God spoke to me about what He was doing in this season.
I think those are two really important questions for us to ask in the middle of painful seasons we do not understand. Because it starts to take the focus off of our circumstances and allows for us to have hope in what God can do outside of them. Colossians 3:1-2 speaks of setting our hearts and minds on things above, where Jesus is, not on earthly things. To me, that means looking outside of our circumstances to Jesus, the one who is above them, and focusing on Him. If God can raise Jesus from the dead, surely He can move in our circumstances, so why would we not look to Him?
But that brings me to another point that I think is really important. Someone asked me the other week why God would allow me to walk through something that brought me so much pain just to work in my heart? My honest answer is I don’t really know. I started wrestling with a similar question when my dad died. I think we all ask it at some point. Why does God allow bad or painful things to happen to the people that He loves? But I remember one day when I was questioning God, He reminded me that He did not love only me. That as much as God loves my mom and my brother and I, He also loved my dad too. In the midst of all of my questions, they all centered around me or my family still here but honestly I left out my dad because I mean God is God surely He could have taken care of all of those details. Like how could my dad being alive not be a good thing?
But see, God is God and He did take care of the details. I may not ever get an answer to the why I have for all of my questions, but I do know the Who. God was never not loving or not in control. I trust with all of me that He loved my dad as much as He loves my family. Because God has still provided for us in my dad’s absence. And He has already used it for His glory. His perspective is SO MUCH bigger than my own. And so even in the not good, God has still been very good.
A lot of us like to look at Jeremiah 29:11 where God tells the Israelites that He knows the plans He has for them. These are plans meant to prosper the Israelites and not bring them harm. That these plans will bring hope and a future. And many of us stop right there. We only read that verse and we don’t know the context. But in my Bible the title above Jeremiah 29 is A Letter to the Exiles. Before verse 11 God tells the people to build houses, plant gardens, marry, start families, and WAIT 70 YEARS IN EXILE. THEN that was when He was going to fulfill His promise them and they would return to Jerusalem. Finally comes verse 11 as a reminder to God’s people that He knew the plans He had for them were for good and prosperity and hope.
I think a lot of times we take that verse for ourselves and use it out of the context it was written. We start to think that we are not going to go through hard or painful things because we have bought into the lie that those things contradict the things that can be prosperous or let us have a future. But WHAT a lie! God may not bring us into exile, although you know it could feel like it sometimes depending on what you are going through, but God surely uses hard things to prosper us and grow us to look more like Jesus if we let Him. We can still have hope in the hard. It is hope that gets us through those things that bring us to our knees. Just because God allows us to walk through something painful does not mean that He has abandoned us.
What I do know is that when we go through things and do not understand stand why, we have to rest on what we DO know. When Job was tempted and everything was taken from him, God never really gave him a direct answer. God just said that He was God. But He also restored and blessed Job with more than what he had lost in the end. I know that we were never promised an easy life in the Bible but in fact the opposite so to expect that being a Christian will change that is just silly. I know that we live in a fallen world with fallen people and that someone else’s choices can still have consequences in our own life. I know that Romans 5:3-5 tells us that perseverance is what produces character and therefore hope within us. I know that Jesus tells us how we will be pruned to grow fruit, and I would think that if plants could feel pain they would not say that is painless. I also know that God loves me and His will towards me is good, but I have a very limited perception of good. Good does not equal what feels good each moment. the Bible never said that God being good had to do with our feelings. I know that God has asked me to trust Him and that He has yet to fail me.
I would be lying if I said that it has been easy to just accept that I am in a season of deep work. Because I feel like I have been in this kind of season for a long time. The last few years have been anything but easy and I am ready for God to say that we are going into a time of seeing the fruit of my obedience. But I am also a full believer in perspective. I believe that when we let God shift our perspective, everything can change. The situation may not, but how we make it through can. I know that I have plenty of areas I can still grow in. I am still learning how to be sustained daily by the Lord. I am learning how to let Him work in all areas of my heart, including the ones I thought I was good on. I am learning every day what full and total trust looks like. Maybe this is not the season I wanted to be in. But there is purpose in it. And I can have hope with that.
Deep Diving 