But It Is

 If you're a reader of God's Word at all, you at least know something about the book of Job. You know that Job was God's example to Satan of a man who was fully devoted to Him. You know too that the Father allowed Satan to test God's trust in Job as well as Job's trust in God with intense and severe affliction. You know all this, but if you're honest, you'll admit that the intensity of the pain and agony that Job must have felt is something you can't really imagine or believe possible for yourself. But what if, at some place in your life, it is?

I don't mean to put myself on the level of Job. What I have suffered in life does not begin to compare with his sufferings. Indeed, they don't compare with what many of my fellow believers have lived and walked through. Yet, I do know they were intense enough that I, like Job, just wished to die in order to escape them.

Few of us can begin to identify with what must have been Job's thoughts when he was hit with wave after wave of horrible, life altering news of death and loss. How his mind must have been reeling, how he must have thought, "This can't be happening." But it was. But it is. That's something that I can identify with very well, for I remember my own such day, and the reeling of my mind, my heart, and my spirit in the midst of it.

It was the day my wife left and took my daughter with her. It was something she had been planning for some time, but that I knew nothing about. She informed me two days before that she would be going. She'd reserved the truck and her father was coming to move her. On the day of the departure, I was numb with shock, My mind couldn't grasp all that was going on. Like Job must have, I thought, "This can't be happening!" But it was. But it is. I felt like I was watching someone else as my life crumbled around me. Even now, more than 30 years later, I can't really begin to describe all the emotions, fears, and sheer terror I was experiencing. I know now that He was present, even speaking in all of it, but I couldn't sense Him and I for sure couldn't hear Him. All I could sense and hear was my pain. That's where Job was. That's where I was. What couldn't happen did happen. What couldn't be, was. Everything around me was shattered, along with everything within. Everything but Him. What shattered me would not shatter Him. Nothing will ever be able to do that.

Someone said that our faith is never real until it has been tested in the fire. Life has taught me the truth of that, and if yours is to be real, it will teach you as well. God had allowed me to enter the furnace. It was devastating. I thought everything had been lost. Not just my marriage and family, but my present and my future. I was in the wasteland. I thought I'd die there. I wanted to die there. God wouldn't allow that. He had more for me. More than I could ever have dreamed of. In His word, He promises to make our deserts bloom with fruit and flowers. He kept His word to me. The suffering and pain were real. He proved to me in their midst that He was more real. If we cling to Him, He'll never fail to prove this to us no matter how desperate our situation is.

We tend to think that a good God should prevent our suffering, that He should stop evil acts. Sometimes He does intervene, but we have to remember and know that we live in a fallen world filled with fallen people who have free will. He will not violate that free will, but neither will He abandon us when we are victimized by the choices of others. On the worst day of my life, in the midst of what couldn't happen, happening, He was there. He was there even if I couldn't sense or hear Him. And He didn't leave me there. Yes, I thought that what was happening couldn't be happening. But it was. It did. But He was the greater happening in all of it. He had hold of my shattered life and all that came along with it, and led me on and out. He will do no less for you.

If you're in that place that Job was, that I was, saying, "This can't be happening," I understand. But it is. Cling to the truth that while it is, He is. He is working, He is moving, He is bestowing grace. This is not the end. Indeed, it's the beginning. The beginning of a deeper experience of Him then you ever knew possible. Trust Him. He won't fail you. All else may fail. He never will.

Blessings,
Pastor O