My mom has osteoporosis, and she had a spontaneous hip fracture of her left hip two weeks ago. She had a partial hip replacement, and she is due home from the hospital today.
I have burned up the roads running to and fro, caring for my mom's house and five cats, and visiting her in the hospital. And the laundry and dirt in my house has mounted. (It is hard to keep a family of five in clean underwear when you aren't home to wash clothes.)
We are at the halfway point of summer already, and I wanted to be so much further down the road of my summer to-do list. Of course, my mom had better things planned than a hip replacement.
It is easy to forget that being a Christian does not mean having a simple, pain-free life. We tend to pray for God to protect us, to bless us, to surround and cover us and those we love. Our prayers are full of expectation that things will go the way we want them to, and all will be well, simply because we are His.
And all is well because we are His.
The problem is that we don't stop to think about what that means, until difficulty or discomfort strikes. Then we wonder what God is up to.
Psalm 96:3 tells us that God will judge people in His faithfulness. Psalm 119:75 says, "in faithfulness You have afflicted me."
Judgment? Affliction? Those are definitely not two words that would come to my mind when pondering God's faithfulness toward me.
That's the problem. I think about God in a certain way, and when He doesn't act the way I think He should, it ruffles my feathers.
"'For My thoughts are not your thoughts,How many times do we read verses like this and quickly say "Amen!" but then whine when things go differently than we expect?
nor are your ways My ways,' declares the Lord.
'For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts'," (Isaiah 55:8-9).
How about you? Have you been going through a tough time?
Maybe God is trying to tell us something about His character, and who He is, by showing us that He is faithful in ways we never realized, or looked for, when things were rosy.
Linking up with others at:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete