Chaplain's Corner

I’m not a big reader, but an author I always enjoy is Max Lucado. He writes prolifically and I recently read through his book “You’ll Get Through This”. He begins the book reporting three encounters with people who told him of terrible setbacks they were experiencing. The first was a woman who lost her husband to infidelity; the second a man who lost his job and the third was a young woman who lost her home due to her parents splitting up. Max writes that he responded to each in the same way, “You’ll get through this. It won’t be painless. It won’t be quick. But God will use it for good. In the meantime don’t be foolish or naïve; but don’t despair either. With God’s help you will get through this.”

Many of us have said something similar to someone going through an incredibly hard time and most of the time we find that the words are not very comforting. We might even believe the words to be true, but we still don’t find them comforting. May I suggest that the purpose of such a message isn’t comfort but truth telling. This is a message that orients us towards the truth so that we can navigate the lies that flood our minds at these times in our lives.

When trouble comes our way our spiritual enemy is all over us with false messages like, “If God really loved you he would have never let this happen.” When we hear these false messages, they sound so true. “Yea, what kind of loving God lets these awful things happen to me?”

I’ll be the first to admit that the biblical truth of the sovereignty of God seems absurd when laid against our experience, the experience of others and the history of the world. But wait a minute, we come at God expecting that he sees things from our perspective. Now that is absurd! If even our poorest views of God are true, I would think that we would expect God to see things from a very different perspective than we do. But if we believe what the Bible reveals about God, we can expect that God’s perspective is absolutely unlike ours in every way.

Suppose you were an ant belonging to a large colony of ants that lived in the middle of a lettuce field in Yuma, Arizona. All of the sudden a huge wall of water floods over the colony, drowning all but a few of the ants that managed to float to something they could climb onto until the flood subsided. From the ants perspective this is a great devastating tragedy. To the farmer’s perspective, one an ant cannot at all comprehend, he is just irrigating his crop.

We are kind of like the ants in the field, when horrible, devastating, personally crushing things come our way we cannot see it any other way, unless we look through eyes of faith. God, like the farmer in the illustration has a greater purpose of the “floods” of our life than we can fathom. But unlike the ants, God has revealed that purpose in broad terms in the Bible, giving us promises and spiritual principles and stories of others who have trusted God to encourage our faith.

In the moment of distress, we can easily forget the “greater than ourselves” God who controls the universe of which we are but a small part. But if we have the eyes of faith we can believe that “we’ll get through this. It won’t be painless. It won’t be quick. But God will use it for good. In the meantime don’t be foolish or naïve; but don’t despair either. With God’s help we will get through this.” Which eyes are you using to view the realities of your life? Your own “ant like perspective” or the “perspective of faith?”