Making Friends With Adversity

 "A Christian's life can not be without sorrows, than the sea without waves." So said  author Thomas Adams. The words seem to leap out of the page toward me. I wonder to myself if I've gotten it all wrong all these years...assuming that because I follow Jesus life will be easy. And perhaps I've lied to others along the way and told them that giving into a relationship with the God of the Universe fixes everything when what I should've been telling them (and telling myself first) was that knowing God doesn't remove suffering but gives you meaning in your suffering. That God's goal isn't always to remove adversity from our lives but to remove the messy in our hearts through the adversity. 

 If I had known this truth many years ago when I first tasted real suffering as I senior in high school (see the "About Me" page of my blog for details), maybe I would've found a way to accept what seemed like God's unfairness and would have discovered grace sooner. Would've seen beauty in the tragedy as a reason to hold out for an undisclosed purpose, a hidden grace, instead of a reason to run from the pain. 

 I read the words over again - instead of it being unreasonable to expect suffering, it is actually unreasonable to not expect suffering. Because it's part of the human experience, and nobody travels this life without it. Somehow we've jaded ourselves into thinking that hardships are something to be avoided instead of it being the very thing that helps to make us whole. God never allows our sorrows merely for the sake of making us miserable - He loves us too much for that - but He does allow them for the sake of making us emptied of self, for the sake of driving us to the cross in helplessness so that we let Him use our worst to write His story. It is simply about accepting the fact that, to our human understanding, God's ways seem hard to trace at times. They seem to not be understandable. Because we see through this life with broken eyes ...eyes that only view the bad unless given new vision to see differently. Because we all start out as broken people. Apart from the saving grace of Heaven, nothing about Christianity will ever make sense to any of us. And even when we come to know Jesus personally, there are still times our human understanding limits us from seeing through to what God is really trying to accomplish. 

 My eyes skim down the page to yet another quote: "One son God hath without sin, but none with sorrow," said John Trapp. Even the Son of God Himself was afflicted, hated, shamed, mocked, and tested. While He was without sin, He did not escape suffering. And shall we, who through salvation have been joined by faith to Him, expect to not travel the same road? Our sorrows we endure are but a fraction of what He went through on our behalf, yet somehow we think we can get away with not having to be refined by the same fire. 

 I remind myself that I need a re-defining of my view on adversity. Instead of shying away from it, I need to run deeper into it. Need to face the fear of what might be and trust the future to the hands of the One who holds it. Instead, I need to accept what is and look for meaning in my tests today. If I am to grow as God intends me to, I need to not be surprised when He asks hard things of me. These difficulties are the making of me. The shaping of whom I'm meant to be. The falling away of the old me that needs to die so that the new me can reign with Jesus. And what's so bad about that anyway?