Show Them Your God

 I could take you right back to the exact spot where the conversation took place - one that would end up changing the course of my life forever. I believe it was a graduation reception that brought us all together, and I was speaking with a childhood friend, catching up a bit on life for both of us. Months before, his family's entire life had gone up in flames - a house fire taking every last thing they owned in a matter of minutes. They had found themselves standing outside in the cold of winter, watching the cinder-show and seeing everything they had built as a family for decades go up in smoke. Oddly enough, my own life had felt like its own fire as I'd been walking through the worst couple years of my life leading up to that point. The two of us spoke that day about how we were navigating everything: the questions, the uncertainty, the struggle to trust God. The friend's external world and my internal world were both ablaze and nothing looked the same as we both approached the age of twenty and felt like our lives had been turned upside down. It was not the future either of us had expected. 

And yet... 

The friend posed that somehow, God knew all of this was coming and was still in control. I was taken aback. While I, too, had been raised in the same faith and would've said years beforehand that I believed in a God who is sovereign, of late I wasn't so sure. My faith looked more like smithereens and fragments of what I'd once claimed. Everything I thought I knew about God and how He worked had been blown up by the events of the last couple years: my father's lengthy illness and multiple brushes with death, my grandfather's passing, my church worship leader's sudden death, and the lingering effects of a young life touched by trauma had left my faith in tatters, and I honestly didn't know what to do. Most of the time, I vacillated between doubt and anger. I didn't trust God anymore. Life had been too confusing and too painful for me to believe that God operated out of love or that He could bring good from the suffering we face. And, out of fear I would look un-Christian, I kept most of these thoughts to myself. It was easier to say that I was fine then to admit that I was in a personal crisis and didn't know how to get out. 

For whatever reason that day, I voiced a tiny bit of my feelings to this longtime friend. Maybe I figured since he was in a crisis of his own, he would grasp or somehow share the thoughts I was working through. As I touched on a bit of what I was struggling with, he seemed to hold my doubt gently and agree that so much lately had felt unfair. But he then directed me to a book that he had been reading that was all about the sovereignty of God. He said it was giving context and meaning to the suffering he and his family had been walking through as they sorted through the ashes of a former life, and he encouraged me to read the book for myself. He hoped I would rediscover a reason to trust God in the midst of what felt like endless darkness to my soul. Strangely, I knew my family had that book. But, after talking to my friend, I was in a fight with God about whether or not to pick it up. I'd always loved reading, but this kind of spiritual genre wasn't really my thing. My Bible was gathering dust, and I just didn't feel like diving into a faith I was already mistrustful of. I never totally let go of my belief in God, but I certainly didn't have confidence in Him. 

For awhile, I put off that book. I wanted to resist and hold out this divine standoff. Somehow, I felt justified in doing so. But I also felt oddly compelled to take up this faith-dare from my friend and my curiosity was getting the better of me. If he found it to be so helpful, maybe there was something in it for me as well. So one day, I took it off the shelf and started reading. And, by the time I was a couple of chapters in, my doubts were cracking under the realization that I totally had the wrong picture of God. I had blamed Him for so much, cried and shouted my anger in His face, asked Him for explanations He didn't actually owe me, all in an attempt to get answers to things I may never understand this side of Heaven. I had operated under an entitled faith: we're good people and thus, you owe us good things and this latest chapter in our story is anything but a good thing; therefore, You can't be trusted. You're not being reasonable. You aren't being fair. Because You allowed this to happen, I don't know if I can believe in You anymore. Now, those very ideas were being shattered in real time as God exposed my heart and showed me how much of Him that I'd missed. And I was broken in contrition for ever thinking that God could have possibly done me wrong. 

By the end of that year, I had been through a months-long spiritual rebirth and could finally say that I was  all-in on trusting God. It's been over fifteen years since that shift took place and a lot has happened in the aftermath of that conversation that changed everything for me. My friend now works in the halls of my nation's government, doing extraordinary work to keep the citizens of my country safe. I am very proud of him. And I'm now in a place in my own story where I'm getting to tell other hurting people the very same thing that my friend told me all those years ago: God knew this would happen and He's still in charge. It may seem paradoxical that God can see our suffering on the horizon and do nothing to stop it yet still be good and carry out a sovereign plan. Yet, once you understand that even your pain is still guided and hemmed in by God  - that it cannot remain with you one second longer nor leave you one second sooner than God has designed - and that even His allowance of this hardship is because He wishes to accomplish something in your life or that of others that could never happen unless this testing occurred... once you get that, it literally shifts everything. You stop seeing God as being cruel and start trusting Him through the mystery. You rest your doubts on a pillow of mercy because You realize that He has treated you far better than you deserve and that this pain is simply an invitation for you to join with the Suffering Savior in His own pains and become transformed yourself as a result. 

What I've never forgotten is the fact that this friend taught me something very important: even when your own heart is breaking, you can still showcase God. You can still anchor into the unchangeable things you know to be true and point others to the Light that is guiding your path through the darkness, even if it's just a glimmer. You can watch your whole world go up in flames and still choose to believe that God is good and, because of your willingness to share, someone else who is treading their own valley may be enabled themselves to believe. I really think that our faith is no more evident than when it appears we have every reason to turn our backs on it. When it seems obvious to the fallible mind that God missed something in letting this massive thing happen and we decide to still love and trust Him anyway, that's a witness of a whole other kind. And, could it be, that's precisely why God may move in a hidden way? 

You may feel like there's no way you can share God with someone when it feels like all you've known has just been taken up in smoke. But I can promise you that your choice to believe in the face of such brokenness may decide the enteral destiny of another. Even if it comes through tears and sorrow, show them your God. You never know who's watching.