A thought by Christine Cane, from her book, How Did I Get Here? (p. 34). Thomas Nelson, Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon to buy the book.)
So important to understand.
Christine says, "It’s a gateway to deeper trust. It is a declaration, 'Yet I will trust you . . . yet I will praise you!' Have you ever been in church, worshipping with all your heart, and poured it all out on the altar and said that to God? I have so many times after I’ve suffered loss, betrayal, disappointment, failure, heartache, and even sickness. In those times, what has resulted has not been anti-faith or anti-hope—quite the opposite. It has led me to greater faith, greater hope, and greater trust. It’s been how I’ve rediscovered my joy in a time when I didn’t have any.
"Still, I wonder if we have been led to believe that to be a good and nice Christian, we need to be in control of our emotions all the time, though the Psalms show us that God wants us to pour them all out to him. God is our safe place. He won’t be offended if we tell him how we really feel or think because he knows anyway, and it’s a sign of trust for us to pour it all out to him. If we don’t go to God with it all, then it will seep out as toxicity onto other people or poison us from the inside out—or both."
She goes on, "Before his crucifixion, Jesus said to his disciples, 'Truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice. You will become sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy' (John 16:20). In my experience, lament that looks to God doesn’t carry us down into a pit but brings us up to a place of greater trust. It makes us recognize our desperate need for God and the bigness of God. It brings us to a place of true humility.
"Lament is different from fear or negativity or hopelessness. It’s more than just weeping, though in lamenting we do weep. As Christian author and professor N. T. Wright said, 'Lament is what happens when people ask, " 'Why?' " and don’t get an answer. It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world.'11 I have several things in my life about which I have asked God why, and after a few years, I still don’t understand, and I still don’t have answers. To this day, I don’t think those situations are fair, and they feel unresolved in my heart. Still, I trust him, but only because I took the time to lament.
"I took it all to God, believed he is good, and asked him to fill in the gap between what I believe and how I feel, and he did. I had to get to the place once more where my faith isn’t based on getting the answer but on trusting his heart. Can you see how lament is actually a posture of faith and trust because it comes out of a belief that God is good and that God does care? As believers who live by faith, lamenting is how we walk through those in-between spaces where we’re waiting and persevering and trusting in spite of all we can’t see. It’s where we 'fight the good fight of the faith' on a deeply personal level (1 Tim. 6:12)."
She later continues, "... we believe that Jesus heals and performs miracles of every kind, even today, but we’re equally aware that the fullness of what will be is not here yet—that all as it should be by his design will be in the new heaven and new earth. What that means is that we live in a world, in communities, in families where people do get sick, where relationships fracture, and where pandemics can still sweep the earth. The kingdom of God is already and not yet."
She then say, "If we learned anything from the coronavirus in 2020, it was that we couldn’t control the future—and what I personally noticed more than anything else was that the people with even-if faith made it through in a completely different way than the ones who spiraled in the what-ifs. Each and every even-if person I spoke to reminded me of the heroes of faith, the ones mentioned in Hebrews 11—Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah—the ones who the Bible says 'all died in faith, although they had not received the things that were promised' (v. 13). Instead, 'they saw them from a distance, greeted them, and confessed they were foreigners and temporary residents on the earth' (v. 13)."
And that is so true, isn't it? Yes, yes! #continuethought
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