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July 15 - July 21, 2024
was experiencing the death of my “normal life.” But people don’t have funerals for “normal.”
We live in a broken world where broken things happen. So it’s not surprising that things get broken in our lives as well. But what about those times when things aren’t just broken but shattered beyond repair? Shattered to the point of dust. At least when things are broken there’s some hope you can glue the pieces back together. But what if there aren’t even pieces to pick up in front of you? You can’t glue dust.
Of all the things God could have used to make man, He chose to use dust. “Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). Jesus used the dust of the ground to restore a man’s sight. Jesus said, “‘While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes” (John 9:5–6). And after the man washed in the pool of Siloam, he went home seeing. And, when mixed with water, dust becomes clay.
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If I want His promises, I have to trust His process. I have to trust that first comes the dust, and then comes the making of something even better with us. God isn’t ever going to forsake you, but He will go to great lengths to remake you. What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?
The enemy wants us paralyzed and compromised by the whispers and doubts and what-ifs and opinions and accusations and misunderstandings and all the other hissing handcuffs crafted by fear.
This is such a ploy of Satan. He loves to take a beautiful moment of life and fill it with a negative narrative about our failures that plays over and over until the voice of God is hushed. Satan perverts the reality that we are beloved children of God. He wants our thoughts to be tightly entangled in his thoughts.
If you have ever experienced an unexpected darkness, a silence and stillness you aren’t used to, know that these hard times, these devastating disappointments, these seasons of suffering are not for nothing. They will grow you. They will shape you. They will soften you. They will allow you to experience God’s comfort and compassion. But you will find life-giving purpose and meaning when you allow God to take your painful experiences and comfort others. You will be able to share a unique hope because you know exactly what it feels like to be them.
You know this whole deal should have and could have been different. But their choices were their own. Their desires, their brokenness, their selfishness, or their lack of awareness left your needs unattended. What seemed so realistic to you was met with a resistance and ultimately a rejection by someone you didn’t think would ever hurt you.
And that’s what it is like to be so very human—hurting but still hoping. Hoping doesn’t mean I put myself in harm’s way. It doesn’t mean I ignore reality. No, hoping means I acknowledge reality in the very same breath that I acknowledge God’s sovereignty.
God doesn’t expect us to handle this. He wants us to hand this over to Him. He doesn’t want us to rally more of our own strength. He wants us to rely solely on His strength.
If we keep walking around, thinking that God won’t give us more than we can handle, we set ourselves up to be suspicious of God. We know we are facing things that are too much for us. We are bombarded with burdens. We are weighed down with wondering. And we are all trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense. Before we can move forward in a healthy way, we must first acknowledge the truth about our insufficiency.
God didn’t cause this potsherd reality in my life. It’s the result of living in this broken world between two gardens.
when you are chosen for suffering, you are chosen for the blessing of displaying the works of God as well. What if the worst parts of your life are actually gateways to the very best parts you’d never want to do without?
But remember, God isn’t causing this; He’s allowing it.
You’ll never know why that person did what they did. Or why the seemingly perfect circumstances shifted and corrupted the way they did. Why the destruction and devastation marched into your life. No, you’ll never know those answers. But trust Me—it wouldn’t make anything better even if you did have those answers. It just wouldn’t. I’ve not kept those answers from you as a cruel exercise of My power. I’ve kept those answers, because only I can bear the weight of them.
To live is to love. To love is to risk pain. To risk pain is to live. It’s what it means to truly be human.
We trust a God who allows hurt. But we also trust a God who uses hurt for good.
