I Will Be With You

Hey, Y'all,

Kind of a more contemplative RST today...also a little longer than usual, but it's been a few extra days, and you're big boys and girls, you can handle it :-)

Been a difficult past few days (weeks, actually, now that I think about it)--not for me, though I have been crazy busy so it hasn't entirely been a walk in the park (taking some creative liberties with the image of my friend Maximus sweatin' and hollerin' at boot camp captures perfectly where I am and brings a wry grin to my face: "I'm full of joy this fine morning, Senior Chief!").

But definitely a difficult stretch for a lot of people I care about, hence making my "light and momentary trials" pale laughably by comparison. There's been way more than the usual turnover at the top of my prayer list these past few days and weeks, and not the good kind. Friends dealing with crazy stuff, some with really difficult stuff, relative near-misses in some cases, and painful bull's-eyes in others...I think especially of my good friend Amanda whose father passed away yesterday after an unexpected, brief, intense illness.

I was talking with another friend about this rough patch and she said, "I don't know what to say to these people." Don't know what to say. Think about it. Funny how utterly hollow and devoid of meaning all the elegant treatises we've read and heard on "The Problem of Suffering"* sound right now. Funny how all those well-reasoned arguments we've embraced in sunnier times leave us cold now. Yeah, I know, there are innumerable texts and passages that address the issue and may in fact bring comfort and peace and reassurance, but it's funny how the only passage repeatedly rolling around my head does not feature God giving us some magical incantation to make the problem go away, or some secret technique to dull the pain. Nope.

Funny, the only passage that brings any semblance of comfort doesn't fix the problem--it just reassures us that God is aware of us, what's more He cares deeply about us, He knows that we suffer sometimes, and He gives His word that He is never going to leave our side while we patiently endure and pass through these difficult times. Maybe that's why this text (Isaiah 43:2) is always the first one to spring to my mind, maybe that's why it's so thoroughly, deeply engraved in my head and heart. When we hurt we don't want to hear eloquent speeches. When we hurt we want loved ones nearby--what they say or fail to say is completely immaterial; we just want them close by.

"When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not consume you."

"I'll be with you," He says. Alright. I'm trusting You. I need You here with me. And I love how He responds; in the verses immediately preceding and following the above statement, He says, "This is what The Lord says, He who created you, He who formed you...For I am your God, your Savior." I will be with you. That's the kind of God I need.

You've been prayed for today...



*(For those who hadn't heard it put that way before, "The Problem of Suffering" takes many forms but fundamentally asks the question, "If there is an all-loving, all-powerful God, then how can there be suffering in the world? He must be either be incapable of preventing suffering--rendering Him less than omnipotent, or He must be unwilling to prevent suffering--which renders Him less than completely benevolent." Prickly problem--must be, 'cause it's been debated for millenia--and everyone at some point has to wrestle with it for themselves. My take on it has been to (try to) accept that I don't have all the facts; I need to add one more "all-something" characteristic of God's to the argument, and that is that He is all-knowing, that He can see every repercussion of every event everywhere, through all of time, and that He can see the end from the beginning, not only here on earth but everywhere in the universe, and thus He is the only one with the entire "Big Picture" in His head. He then tells me, "Trust me. I know this is painful, I know it's not fair, I know you hurt. But trust me. I know how The Story ends--yours, humanity's, the entire titanic struggle against evil. Trust me. I am your God, your Savior; this all works out in the end." So I trust Him, all the while trying desperately to remember that I don't have all the facts, and that even if I did, as a favorite quote of Ellen White's reassures me, "God never leads His children otherwise than they would choose to be led, if they could see the end from the beginning." So I trust our heavenly Father, 'cause really, that's all you can do--when you don't have all the facts).