Why Bother?

Have you ever made a decision to go deep? To make a turnaround – do the right thing? To ‘seek God’ in a new way- to feed your spirit in a fresh way? We aim to do a heart adjustment, only find that things around us start ‘ breaking’ – falling to pieces. The ground beneath starts to shake and we question ‘why’. How could I do the right thing and the wrong thing happens? Why Bother? I watched someone in my circle face this recently and I know it challenges her faith even now. Why bother when ‘ills’ befall us all anyway?

Somehow, we’ve been led to believe that if we seek to please God we will be exempted from life’s trials. We don’t have to live long to realize that bad things do happen to ‘good’ people. I use the word ‘good’ loosely as Christ Himself says only God is good. The best of us is flawed. This is the reality of being human. We are housed in a vessel that was not meant to last forever. We get sick. Sin causes people to hurt us or we hurt them. Our broken sinful nature at times responds with venom from a place of pain. Hurting people hurt others. We live in a fallen world – we will encounter unfairness, injustices, loss, failures, equal pain and equal joy. Christ Himself said, ” In this world you will have trials…” So then, why bother? Why bother to trust God. I’ll share what I’ve discovered.

Dear Questioning One:

Life is messy – God knows that so He sends help. We were never meant to do life alone. Quite often human help is limited. Because of our insufficiency and God’s omniscience, we need His help to navigate this journey called life. This life that comes with challenges of varying sorts. God never promised to shelter us from suffering. It is actually on the other side of pain that often we find a better you – a better me. God uses tough times as tools to refine and strengthen us. With the right response, we learn to find purpose in trials. We glean much from these life lessons and are schooled on how to stand amidst the storms of life. We then become the answer to someone else’s prayer and a true source of comfort. We learn to touch others from a place of compassion because of our own odyssey.

So why bother trusting God? Well without Him walking me through this all, I’d fall apart. It is in trusting Him that I find the peace to calm the inner storms. It is then that I can walk through the ‘valley of the shadow death and fear no evil’. This is why I don’t ‘look like what I’ve been through’. It is at His feet that I find grace enough to go through the inevitable. There is a strength I can draw from that energizes and propels me forward when I’ve reached the end of me. To those who wonder; this is how I can show up in pain. How I stay in the game though I’m hurt and wounded. I find light when darkness swirls around, questions are left unanswered, human wisdom fails, and nothing makes sense. He does – there is no confusion in Him. Truly ‘no one can measure the depths of His understanding’. He indeed ‘ knows the way that I take and when he has tried me; I will come forth like pure gold’. Nothing about us goes unnoticed by Him. Again, why bother? I have nothing to lose trusting Christ and everything to gain doing life with Him.

***Thanks for reading – We trust , even if….