The kids game me a few pretty loaded questions here (note the heavy title)...But I think it's something that people struggle with no matter how old they are. I know that I have definitely been faced with the challenge of, "do I really trust that God is good even though _____ is happening?"
I'm sure you have too, and today I just want to talk about that in answer to the three questions that I have remaining from my time at VCS.1. Over the past years I have learned that God is a loving God who wants the best for you. So why does God allow bad things in life to hurt people even if we love Him and have accepted Him?
2. When things don't end up right, how can one put things in the past and move on?
3. How did you learn to deal with the hard things in life?
There is not one easy answer for all of these, but I will do my best to answer them...
I too, have learned that God is a loving God and he DOES want the best for me. What is more difficult to understand is that what truly is best for me, may not be what I want it to look like. It might take twists and turns for me to get to be/find my best.
The Bible never says life will be easy. It does say this though: “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Which is its own verse, but comes on the tail end of, “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), Ephesians 6:2-3.
The Bible doesn't say that things will be easy, and it doesn't say that you can do whatever you want to. It says, obey and things will go well.
What if we obey and things are still hard and hurt me? They will. When you obey, I can guarantee, things WILL still be hard.Things WILL still hurt you. Why? Because we live in a dark, sinful world and we are dark, sinful people that can only see what is right now.
If you refer back to my post from Monday, I actually talked about this exact thing. When we ask God for things, the answers may not come the way we want them. Why? Because God knows that we only learn through discipline.
Think about being in school. Would you remember your lessons if you didn't have to do the homework that went with, or the task of working through the problem to get to the answer? Probably not.
Just like small children won't learn right from wrong if they aren't disciplined for doing wrong.
Our Father God is a passionate teacher and father to us. He knows each one of us and his plan for us and often times, the difficulties that we endure, he will use to shape us and to minister to others if we allow him to.
To answer the second question, we don't really have to "put things in the past" we do need to move on, but if we take the difficulties with us and LEARN from them, they can come along because chances are high, there is someone else out there wondering the same thing, or how to get through _____ and your testimony of faithfulness is just what they need to hear.
If we were to put everything in our past, what kind of life would we be living? We would go ahead and make the same mistake, or have a repeat of what just happened because we need to LEARN from our difficult things, we need to allow God to work through them and show us what he was doing in the midst of them.
How did you learn to deal with the hard things in life? Well, I feel like I still don't deal well with them, but I have learned to allow God to be there with me. I have struggled with feeling like everything that I prayed would go unanswered and I struggled with grasping how prayer truly is powerful when that happened.
But God is so good, and so loving, he continued to hold my hand even though I was trying to yank it away while crossing the street. He showed me that no matter what I prayed, he DID answer me, it just didn't look the way I wanted it to. The other side of the answer is so much more beautiful than I EVER could have imagined.
Because I never doubted that he had a plan for our struggle. I think that's the best way to deal with hard situations, no matter what it is.
Trust that God has a plan for your struggles.
When you do that, you keep your eyes focused on Jesus and no matter how big the waves are on either side of you as you walk towards him, you won't sink. You will get wet with the splashes, and the lapping of them, you will get knocked around and maybe even stumble, but you won't SINK.
I hope this was helpful and encouraged you. No matter what hardship you are enduring in life, no matter what struggle, God has a plan to use it for your good. It may not be a punishment to you, you probably did nothing to "deserve" what you are going through - it just might be that God wants to show you a glimpse of his powerful beauty on the other side of your faithfulness.
Have a good Wednesday, friends!
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