Chapter 15: BUT LIFE OUGHT TO WORK
I'm drowning
in my own lake of despair.
I'm choking,
my hands wrapped around my neck.
I'm dying.
Quickly my soul leaves, slowly my
body withers.
It isn't suicide,
I consider it homicide.
The world you created has led to my death.
-poem by Rachel Joy Scott, shot in the Columbine High School shootings
"We assume life is supposed to work in ways that make us feel the way we want to feel, the way we intuitively and irresistibly sense we were designed to feel.
We further assume that if there is a God, His job is to do what we cannot do to make life work as we want..."
COUNTING ON GOD
If you believe life is supposed to work well enough for people to feel good, you would have been alarmed by a struggle you could not explain. You might have encouraged her to trust in the God who loved her to make her dreams come true. If she couldn't respond to that encouragement, you might have referred her to counseling.
But suppose you were convinced of a very different understanding of life. Suppose you believe God is
not committed to making our lives work well enough for us to feel good. What would you say then? Perhaps something like this:
"Rachel, your pain is legitimate. You've discovered the part of your soul that longs for what this world will never provide. Your integrity has burdened you with the severe mercy of realizing that nothing in this world provides true joy.
"You've come to a fork in the road. One path beckons you with the promise that life can work well, and God exists to see to it that things go well enough for you to feel pretty good.
"The other path, the narrow one that not many choose, invites you to live in a disappointing world where good dreams will shatter and you will sometimes feel empty and alone, sometimes so empty and alone that it will seem like death. But this path promises the eventual discovery of a consuming desire within you for God and, far better, the thrilling discovery of His consuming desire to be intimate with you.
"After many dark nights, you will taste the joy of that intimacy. You will not be able to describe it, but you will feel alive, hopeful, solid, even in the middle of continued anguish over hard circumstances.
"Abandon yourself to God. He will seem at times cruelly unresponsive, callously indifferent. You will be tempted to manage life on your own, to do whatever you can to feel better.
"But if you're quiet, you will hear both His voice and yours leading you to the narrow path."
In our deceived culture, we must grasp the truth of what God is now doing in our lives or we will miss the joy of Christianity. God is
not cooperating with us to make life work so we can feel now all that He has created us to feel. But many people think He is. They think that's His job.
There are two problems with that view:
One, better circumstances, whether winning the lottery or saving your marriage, can never produce the joy we were designed to experience. Only an intimate relationship with Perfect Love can provide that joy.
Two, in this life, we can never feel what God intended us to feel, at least not in full measure. To be completely happy, we must experience perfect intimacy with Perfect Love
and every "second-thing" blessing that Perfect Love can provide. In this life, we have neither. God will provide both, but not till heaven.
It's hard to hear, but it is important to know that God is not committed to supporting our ministries, to preventing our divorces, to preserving our health, to straightening out our kids, to providing a livable income, to ending famine, to protecting us from agonizing problems that generate in our souls an experience that feels like death.
We cannot count on God to arrange what happens in our lives in ways that will make us feel good.
We can count on God to patiently remove all the obstacles to our enjoyment of Him. He is committed to our joy, and we can depend on Him to give us enought of a taste of that joy and enough hope that the best is still ahead to keep us going in spite of how much pain continues to plague our hearts.
God's intense desire is to intimately relate with us. For His desire to be realized, He must remove the obstacle within us that, more than any other, stands in the way of intimacy with Him. That obstacle is this:
When we feel bad, when our internal experience as we live in this world is different from and less than what we know we were created to feel, we assume there is no higher value than to change that experience. We therefore devote our central energies to feeling better and to justifying whatever does the job.
The belief that there's no higher good than feeling better now, and the top priority urge to feel better now--these represent the single biggest obstacle to our enjoying God's Presence. The Bible calls it the flesh.
(Excerpt from Shattered Dreams by Larry Crabb, pages 142-144.)
