What looks like ruin

"No doubt affliction now seems to you a far more intense and real thing then it ever did before; the griefs of human life are far more awful and terrific to you now than they ever before seemed. But the power of grace is the master of them..." -Letter from a friend to Dr Robert Dabney

There are days when all I can do is cry. Today is one of them. After an exhausting morning I returned to my home only after a few hours at work. Some days the pain seems to seep into my bones and I cannot think of anything else but Dabney and her absence from our home.

Lately, my thoughts are fixed on the will of God. In his book From Grief to Glory, James Bruce writes, "there is an increase in the knowledge of God that comes when we ourselves 'will' what God ordains concerning us; when willingly we adapt ourselves to what he has determined for us, not only without complaint and murmuring, but with the historic courage of faith. Often, however, one must travel over rough and painful terrain before coming to this knowledge of God."

It is easy for me to rest in God's sovereign will when I am happy and my "cup [is] full to overflowing," but lately I have found myself wrestling with idea of God's will being painful.

"How could a God who is Love be so cruel as to cast [me] down from the heights of [my] great happiness into the depths of bereavement and grief?" It is such a hard lesson to learn "when for the first time in [my] life the cross with its full weight is laid upon [my] shoulders" and I am left without happiness, without strength, stunned and crushed. I struggle with this new image of God.

However, slowly God is chipping away my warped belief that He does not direct my life according to my desires, and His power is not to serve my self interest. Instead He is showing me the real God, the God who exists outside of myself the God whose "appointment covers all the suns and stars, all hours and centuries, and causes all creatures to revolve themselves around Him...His counsel and plan are as high as heaven and consequently exceed our comprehension. [My desire should not rest in the] verification of His counsel but should seek to enter into a life of it."

Speaking (or typing) these truths is all well and good, but living them is another. I pray this knowledge brings my heart to a better understanding that although this process is painful, God is not moving away from me but drawing me near to Him.

"Then Job answered the Lord and said, 'I know that you can do everything, and that no purpose of yours can be withheld from you...I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.' -Job 42:1,5