You yourself have recorded my wanderings. Put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?…This I know: God is for me. Psalm 56:8-9
Read the whole psalm and you’ll see that David was not in an enjoyable situation. Yet he still spoke the words: ‘This I know: God is for me.’
Which would tell us one thing; God can be for us and life can still feel hard. Tears can flow and flow and flow and yet God bottles each one up, as if to say ‘I see your pain, dear child, and I care deeply about every, single, tear you shed.
Read any story in the Bible and you’ll find everyday people trusting God, even when it’s uncomfortable. Because what’s faith, trust and hope if we know all the answers. If everything always makes sense and is comfortable.
When God called Abraham to leave his family for an unknown land I can’t help but think of Sarah, his wife, and how she must have been feeling. Not much is said about her other than she left with her husband, leaving behind their land, their family, their comforts.
God never promises us a life of comfort. But he does promise us peace, joy, and rest, in Him.
When God asked us to move from our home in Oregon, surrounded by family, in a home and on property that He had blessed us with only a few years earlier, Where deep and life long friendships we’re being formed. My heart broke. Why God? Do we really have to? Isn’t there another way? You’ve put dreams in our heart for this place and these people, dreams that are still unfulfilled, unrealized. So beautiful and God ordained yet not yet come to fruition. Tears were shed. Tears are still shed. Not because God isn’t good or because he doesn’t care about every detail of our lives, but because sometimes the things he asks us to do are hard. Sometimes we have to give up more than we ever thought possible.
But one thing I’ve learned this year is that hard is not the same as bad. Hard things hurt. Hard things take us beyond our own capabilities Hard things are heavy. But just because something is hard does not mean it’s bad. It’s in the hard that we lean in to God’s strength, ‘When we are weak He is strong.’ It’s in the hard that he carries us through. It’s in the hard that we can declare ‘This I know: God is for me.’
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