Heart Tracks - When God Is Unfair

    Fairness.  Everyone, from politicians to children seems to have a very clear idea as to what's fair and what's not.  Life teaches us many things, and foremost among them is that life itself is not fair.  That's a hard thing to learn.  It's even harder to learn that God Himself is oftentimes "not fair," at least from our perspective.

     Speaker and writer Jennifer Rothschild, who's been blind since age 15, related recently about having put off listening to a CD that contained a testimony from a woman who was afflicted with the same blinding retinal disease as her.  Finally, she did, and as the sister in Christ began to tell of her affliction, she could relate completely with the pain, frustration, and suffering that comes along with the disease.  She could identify too with the woman's telling of how she and her husband would go to their knees in prayer, crying out to God for healing, for Rothschild and her husband had done the same.  Then came the part that she had been dreading, the place where the woman told of how the Father had miraculously healed her, restoring her sight completely.

Her testimony gave wonderful glory and praise to God, and though Rothschild could rejoice for the lady, she was left with a deep feeling of emptiness because she, unlike her sister, had never received a healing.  She was still blind.  Rothschild commented, "I know His ways are perfect, but so often, they seem perfect for someone else, and not me."  We may know that thought as well.  He is markedly fair with someone else, but seemingly so unfair with us, at least to our understanding.
    Psalm 138:8 reads, "The Lord will work out His plans for my life."  What do we do when His "plan" is so markedly different from ours?  Our plan included healing, deliverance, provision, abundance.  His doesn't appear to contain any of that.  What do we do when His plan takes the way of pain, loss, heartache and need?
What do we do when we discover that His plan always, without exception, includes His cross, and His suffering?  What do we do with all the "gaps" He seems to leave in our lives, all those places where He appears to be absent, seemingly uncaring?  What do we do with what Rothschild calls "the missing pieces" of our lives, pieces that He could supply, but doesn't.    T. Austin-Sparks once wrote, "Our testing will be such that we will not make it through apart from the divine intervention of heaven."  What do we do when His intervention looks more like a collision, indeed a collision with Him and all the ideas we've had about Him?

What do we do when the missing pieces continue to go missing?  The truth is that there is nothing for us "to do," only for us "to be."  That place of being is to allow Him to fill those gaps, those missing pieces with Himself, where we receive all of Him for all of our need.  In that place we will find something greater than the need, the pain, the healing.  We will find Him, all of Him.  When we receive a whole God, one who is above and beyond all our ideas of fairness and what is right, we will ourselves become whole.  The affliction may remain, but the gaps, the missing pieces don't.  They're filled with the wonder, beauty, and life of Himself.  He may not do what we think is fair, but if we truly will receive Him, all of Him, He will surely be shown to do for and in us what is right.
     Something I pray for myself and all those on my prayer list is that we would live life from a place of His rest.  This can never be as long as we strive to find out what it is we must "do."  It only comes from receiving Him into all those gaps in our lives, all of those places that are missing pieces.  This is not being resigned to defeat, but instead being lifted up to the life of victory and overcoming.  Had the Father removed Paul's thorn in the flesh as he asked, Paul would never have experienced the wonders of the third heaven, the wonders of His God.  In that place he knew that the Father's ways were perfect, that though the thorn remained, he was whole, at rest, in the hands of a God who may not be safe, but who is most certainly good.  May each of us live in those hands, and that heart as well.

Blessings,