“Why can’t God just make my life better? Right now.”  In twenty years of hearing clients talk about their difficult lives, I’ve heard many variations on that sentence.

In the middle of a divorce, a man wonders why God didn’t save his marriage. He’d prayed for five years for his wife to fall in love with him again.  A woman remembers the time an older cousin, at a family reunion at a lake pavilion, took her behind a shrub and took advantage of her four-year-old innocence. As she feels that betrayal, she says, “Why can’t God just take this pain away?” Walking out of the cancer clinic, a patient wonders, “Why doesn’t God just stop these runaway cells?”

Are you there today? Are you wondering why God doesn’t just make it all better?

If that’s the pain you feel today, I’m sad with you. I can’t imagine your doubt, anger, fear, sadness. I know what that desire for God to make it all better was like for me, but I don’t know what it is like for you.

Often, Jesus does not meet our expectations. We want immediate results. Especially where emotional healing is concerned, he works with us over time, in a process. We want a certain kind of resolution, in a certain way, at a particular time. How hard it is to submit to the processes that he has designed for our healing.

Our limited perspective means we need input from others.  Our aloneness means we need an arm around our shoulders. Our weakness means we need God’s strength, endurance, and encouragement, (Romans 15:5) just at the time when we doubt his desire to give them.

Father, you know our hearts and you know our needs. You have made healing a process. Help us submit to that process. In the name and for the glory of Jesus, Amen.