Submission to Future Pain

Recently a pastor’s sermon challenged the congregation to reflect on their lives as they were 5 years ago, and compare it with their lives today to see the progress God has built into their lives.  I was in that congregation, and I have been meditating on that challenge ever since.

My first thought was that yes, I had grown—but not in the ways I wanted to grow!  There are several pet sins in my life that I have begged God to purge for years, yet I see little or no improvement.  If I focused on those evidences, I would certainly despair of my salvation.  But the unavoidable conclusion was that there were differences in my life compared to five years ago, and on the whole, they were evidence of growth:  they just weren’t in the areas that I think must be important to God!

Behold my arrogance:  as if I know what is most important to Him.

Instead of targeting what I DO, the changes targeted what I believe and how I react in attitude to my circumstances.  This was somewhat disappointing:  after all, I want to glorify God by becoming such a great Christian on the outside that people will look at me and notice how well I glorify Him…oh, wait.  That’s not glorifying God.  That’s glorifying me.  Well, then, I want to glorify God by doing awesome, difficult things for Him so that people will be amazed at the things I have accomplished for…oops.  That’s not glorifying God, either.

Well, then, at the very least I just don’t want to hurt anymore.  Recently, though, I’ve realized that not even that will best glorify God.  Instead, God has been enabling me to pray that He would make me able to submit to the pain that is in His plan for my future.

You see, I have been through a lot in the last 12 years of my life.  God took my husband Home instantaneously through a hit-and-run accident when our children were 15, 12, 5, and 15 months.  I was left to raise them on my own, while grieving the loss of my best friend and lover. 

A few years afterward we moved and joined a local church which, at first, felt like “home”.  During this time I developed a serious crush on a single fellow in our congregation:  only to discover that he was secretly a child pornography addict when he was arrested by the FBI.  This hurt so bad, mostly because I had exposed my children to danger through my undisciplined emotions, though I had worked very hard to control them both before the children and in public.

Not long after that it was revealed that the pastor of the church where we were serving was not a pastor at all:  rather he was a manipulative, power hungry tyrant.  Our family had invested heavily in this church both with service and with finances.  As far as I could tell, I was following God as hard as I could when we joined there.  So to discover this and go through the pain of trying to reconcile, being rejected and having all our service rejected, and then having to separate from the congregation without anyone truly understanding why was extremely painful and something I determined to avoid at all costs for both myself and my children’s sake in the future.

We fled to a small, uber-denominational church which my parents attended and which we judged to be at least safe from megalomaniacal leadership due to its governmental structure.  And four years later we left, having discovered that obedience to the scriptures was not considered an imperative for the members of this “church”.

During that time other difficulties arose within our own family which caused deep fear and distress and even depression (in retrospect).  These months were so painful that I literally cried almost every day, often spent days with my stomach in knots, unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time.  I was trying so hard to follow God, and yet these painful things were happening to me!

I share all this so that you will know, when reading what comes after, that I am not speaking out of a lack of experience of deep emotional and spiritual pain.  Because it’s possible that it may seem crazy for me to pray that God would make me able to submit to the pain He has planned for my future.  I am highly motivated to avoid a repeat of intense pain of any kind!

However, after serious reflection and meditation on these experiences and comparing them to scripture and what I know of the God of the bible, I have come to conclude that there is no way I could have avoided those painful experiences. 

In America especially, but probably in human experience generally, pain and suffering are something we think we should avoid at all costs.  A gospel of pain-avoidance has been preached…from prosperity preachers to the stolid fundamentalist teacher, if-you-would-just-live-this-way-do-this-follow-this-set-of-rules has been proclaimed as the gospel of pain avoidance. “Those terrible things wouldn’t have happened to you if you had only done [fill in the blank]”.

But a serious study of scripture will show this to be no gospel at all.  If we could save ourselves, we would.

Let me be sure to clarify something before continuing:  what I am not saying here is that I am perfect and blameless in each of these circumstances.  What I AM saying is that even if I had been perfect and blameless in each of them, there would still have been pain—I still would have encountered painful situations in my life.  Living blamelessly is no panacea.  Being perfect and sinless doesn’t lead to painlessness. (If you think I'm wrong, just meditate for a moment on our Lord:  sinless, but not painless!)

Following each of these experiences I found myself afflicted with the “what if” syndrome.  The motivation to avoid any future pain of that type and intensity drove me to frantically consider what I could have done to avoid these experiences.  I blamed myself, mostly, and sought to pinpoint the exact moment when I deviated from the “path”, causing so much agony for my children and myself, so much disillusionment.  But eventually I came to realize that I couldn’t have, wouldn’t have done anything different.  The “what if” syndrome extends to the future, also: constantly fearing what might happen, what bad decisions I might make, what evil people might inflict upon us, what mess an incomplete understanding of God’s instructions might lead to.  If I couldn’t have avoided it in the past, then I logically come to the conclusion that neither can I do anything to avoid future pain.

Recently someone expressed to me their belief that the doctrines of Calvinism seemed to them the most hopeless of gospel understandings.  These painful experiences have emphatically taught me differently:  God’s Sovereignty, His ordination of everything that I have been through, is the most hopeful thing I can imagine.  I cannot save myself—not for eternal life, and not in this life.  I cannot even behave in such a way as to avoid pain.  But God has ordained that only that pain which will best benefit me and ultimately best glorify Him, and not a smidgen more or less, will be allowed in my life.

And that is why my prayer for myself now is that I may jettison the “what if” syndrome, cease to try to figure out what I can do to avoid future pain, and instead concentrate on Christ and Him crucified:  To seek His kingdom zealously, to love unreservedly, to be involved generously, to live graciously and joyfully, not in fearful expectation but in glorious hope of the redemption of ALL things.  These scriptures inform my prayers:

who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6       In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7       so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.  1 Pe 1:5–7

Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 10       He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. 2 Co 1:9–10

Oswald Chambers has this to say on the subject in the devotional for October 23 (God’s Sovereignty at work again!):

Our Lord never nurses our prejudices, He mortifies them, runs clean athwart them…. It is part of our moral education to have our prejudices run straight across by His providence, and to watch how He does it. God pays no respect to anything we bring to Him; there is only one thing He wants of us, and that is our unconditional surrender….How are we going to get the life that has no lust, no self-interest, no sensitiveness to pokes, the love that is not provoked, that thinketh no evil, that is always kind? The only way is by allowing not a bit of the old life to be left, but only simple perfect trust in God, such trust that we no longer want God’s blessings, but only want Himself. Have we come to the place where God can withdraw His blessings and it does not affect our trust in Him? When once we see God at work, we will never bother our heads about things that happen, because we are actually trusting in our Father in Heaven Whom the world cannot see.

In the devotional Thoughts for the Quiet Hour, the meditation for today is on I Kings 2:38; “As my lord the king hath said, so will thy servant do”:

There is something infinitely better than doing a great thing for God, and the infinitely better thing is to be where God wants us to be, to do what God wants us to do, and to have no will apart from His. • G. Campbell Morgan

And our hope in this was simply and profoundly stated by my daughter in an answering text as we discussed giving in to the realization that we can only learn from what is coming, not avoid it:

"Amen, and no matter what happens, God is in control and there is a time coming when everyone will be completely trustworthy!"

Thinky Things

If you’ve made it to the end of this lengthy post, I thank you for persevering, and by way of thanks this once I will not impose distracting thoughts of my own on your meditation.  The following scripture references may be of assistance: 1 Sam 2:9, Job 23:20, Psalm 66:10, Isa 48:10, Rom 8:18, 2 Cor 4:17, 2 Thess 1:7-12, James 1:2-3, I Pet 4:12-13.  As you ponder, remember to…

HOLD FAST