Entrusted

Her words, spoken to me months ago, are brought to memory. Perhaps I need them now and that is why. At the time she said them, I was not yet ready to embrace or understand what she meant. But I'm starting to now. Breathed out of a heart that has known great tragedy, she said that she prayed and hoped I'd find what had been granted to her: the peace of being entrusted. Of having a deep knowledge in the heart that God had gifted her with a story only she could live and that somehow, He knew that, in so doing, "she will be able to shine for Me; she will cling to Me." 

When I first heard my friend say this, I understood what she was talking about, but I wasn't certain such peace could be mine. My pit was so deep. My heart was so dark. I wasn't sure I wanted to be entrusted with a story like this of my own. Why would anyone want to consider a story such as mine as being a gift? But then I thought of hers and wondered if, perhaps, it wasn't as impossible as it felt at that moment. 

Just maybe Glory is found in things otherwise written off as being bearers of pain when, in reality, they are actually ministers of hidden blessing? 

Maybe this was what a Christian interviewer had in mind when she replied years ago to a severely-injured Vietnam veteran, Dave Roever, who had just mentioned that he wasn't sure why he'd been allowed to suffer such pain, "You know why God didn't stop it from happening? Because He knew He could trust you with the scars." Dave said later that those words changed his entire perspective on why he'd been injured. 

Is it possible that Divine Providence so loves us that He allows us, like Job, to be afflicted, tested, tried because He knows our story won't become what it's meant to without the wounds we acquire? Knows we will have no message if there aren't scars by which to tell it? 

And could it be that He whom we follow, who is known by His own scars, uses our soul-bleeding places as an entrance point into greater identifying with Him? 

Suppose it's true that a believer can't fully enter into their purpose without a measure of pain along the way. If that's the case, why are we so quick to run from it? Why are we so fast to deny the very agent by which we discover our story's meaning? Maybe the answer is best explained by author and pastor, Ron Dunn when he wrote, "...we humans have a fatal flaw: we believe we can accurately interpret every event and experience in our lives. But kings sometimes come to our door dressed as beggars, blessings are often disguised as curses, and we often entertain angels unaware." 

So perhaps what we blame as being the problem - our suffering - is, in reality, not the problem at all. Perhaps we are actually the problem. Perhaps we have become so fixed in our ways, so set in our human perspective, that we are really missing God when He shows up. Perhaps, while we pray for Him to become visible that we might greater believe, we are dismissing the King when He arrives differently than we expect. 

God never did show up how mankind thought. The Jews anticipated a royal conqueror who would defeat the Romans. Instead, He came as a helpless infant - born in a stable to a humble carpenter and teenage girl. They thought victory looked like great armies but, to God, it looked like dying on a cross and being buried in a tomb, only to rise again on the third day. Throughout history, people thought God would use the educated, the rich, the powerful, the well-liked, the strong to achieve His greatest work. Rather, He has often used the un-learned, the poor, the meek, the dis-missed, the weak because, in their supposed lack, Christ became all the more magnified. God has always been in the business of upending conventional thought. 

So just maybe we need to be upended too? Need to be shaken in order to recognize that the God we know and love is revealing Himself always but, sadly, perhaps we miss Him because we are too blind to see beyond the hiddenness of His ways? 

Looking back over my own story, I must admit that my greatest evidences of God's character came not in the still-calm of life but in the depth of my soul's deepest misery. And, for all the times, I asked for another story, pleaded with God to alter the direction, begged for a different way, God's answer came back to this: there is no other way. You must go through in order to get to. The way will you will honor Me isn't by your grand achievements but by your faith. It isn't by your happiness but by your holiness. It isn't by getting through life with the least amount of wounds but rather, letting your wounds be the means by which I show the world who I am and what I can do with a yielded life. 

One never knows until they travel a certain road how they will fare along the way. It's probably wise that God doesn't tell us all that's ahead, for we would surely turn back and avoid the journey if we knew. Along the way, we discover we are often weaker than we suppose but also more enduring than we ever dared imagine. In doing life with God, we find out the truth of my friend's words in that, once we've lived our story for awhile, we begin to feel a confirming in our deepest soul that we have been graciously led. That we have been gifted, entrusted with something to live - something to say - that only we can. That God has somehow nodded in affirmation, even as His gifts came disguised in the seemingly worst. 

Ron Dunn says, once again, "...there is confidence that where I am, I am there because He maneuvered me there. I have great assurance that hither by His grace I've come... I wish I could say the initiative was mine, that mine has always been the glad surrender. I've honestly tried a few times, but I ran out of resolve, out of commitment, out of love. But I did not run out of Him." 

And maybe this is what it all comes down to: for the Christian, their story is never ultimately their's to begin with. To request a different narrative is to deny the sovereign wisdom of the One who selected your story before the beginning of time. Purpose comes in accepting the book of you as God has handed it to you and believing, in faith, that all will be well in the end. The chapters in between the prologue and the epilogue may be ones of relative ease or ones of great distress and sorrow. But, because the Author can never not be good, even the chapters you would rather avoid become the exact means to the things for which you have been uniquely prepared and designed. 

In time, maybe the very things you sought to dismiss and escape can become the ones you one day embrace? Maybe the God who's plans you once wanted to ignore will one day be the only One to whom you desperately cling.