“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.

Affection Pictures, Images and PhotosOur 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.

 

In the Midst of Ordinary Life

A week ago, the Japanese were working, playing, and studying, when the ground began to shake. The shaking continues–after tsunami, on to radiation releases with long-term consequences. Economic shaking will ripple through their bank accounts. In the midst of their ordinary lives, they have awakened to the extraordinary.

Though we may be thousands of miles removed from this current shaking, we ache with them because we know what a life changed in an instant feels like. Even if whole pieces of our country and economy have not been devastated, many of us have answered the phone call or opened the door to a reality that shifted our personal foundations.

Especially if we are Americans, the very normality of our lives can lull us into a kind of short-sightedness. We forget that we will all die. We wake up, we eat breakfast, we go to the office or to the kitchen for our daily work. We drive home through rush hour traffic or we ride the train or we wait for a spouse to return from his or her work.

The days pile on each other, in a rhythm that lulls us into certain kinds of expectations. We do not expect the ground to shake today. We expect our spouse to return with a smile, our children to live to adulthood. We expect life to go on, as we know it now. Though we vaguely know we’ll die someday, it seems far off.

And yet. Life will not always be as we expect. There is an end coming. Psalm 90 teaches us to “number our days.” Indeed, our days can be numbered and wisdom keeps that in mind, in the ordinariness of our everyday lives.

Father, we pray for mercy for the people of Japan. And we pray for wisdom for all of us, to recognize the deeper realities. For your glory and your coming kingdom. Amen.

Listen

1 Listen to this, all you people!
Pay attention, everyone in the world!
2 High and low,
rich and poor—listen! Psalm 49:1-2

What does it take to listen? To concentrate our attention towards hearing? The psalmist goes on to speak of wisdom. He talks specifically of rich people going to the grave like everyone else, leaving their wealth behind.

Every communication has a communicator, a message, and a receiver. To listen to the psalmist’s message, we need to define “wealth” like he does. I’d bet he would say nearly all of us reading this are “wealthy.” If we define the wealth as “someone who enjoys more resources than me” have we really heard?

ear Pictures, Images and PhotosWe may have had our own thoughts sparked by his words, but if listening is understanding the message that was sent, we haven’t truly listened.

On Oprah, yesterday, I listened to sexually abused men, telling of ways trusted adults used them, as little boys, for the adult’s perverted pleasure. It was hard to listen. I listened because they needed to tell. Oprah mirrored compassion  to them, just as I would have had they been in my office. Abuse victims first need to believe they will be believed.  Unlike many of their families, they knew Oprah would believe them.

Real listening, person to person, takes concentrated effort. It takes love. It takes commitment. It takes believing that every person is “created in the image of God, of much worth and value.” That phrase is from Dianne Leman last Sunday:  http://www.thevineyardchurch.us/podcast .

Who will cross our path today who needs to be listened to? Spouse, child, neighbor, grocery store clerk? To listen is to love. To love is to obey Jesus’ command to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”

Holy Spirit, give us power, today, to listen.