More Than Stone

I just got off the phone with a dear friend. Please pray for her. Her husband is across the country and unable to get home until next week. They are financially VERY tight, with no health insurance for Mom and Dad. She thinks her 4 kids are sick, as is she. And now her mother (who lives with them) is gravely ill and hospitalized with a very rare disease whose name escapes me. I happened to call her tonight, not knowing what was going on. She sounded awful, perhaps at the breaking point. There is a lot going on in that home. More than one woman can handle on her own. Unfortunately, I live 400 miles away, or I’d go scoop those 4 sick kids up and put her in bed.

Towards the end of the conversation, she said “I’m just trying to figure out what God is trying to teach me in all of this. I know there must be something I have to learn.” OH, how I hate that sentence! I lived and breathed that sentence for 6 months last year. What is it about our faith/teaching/evangelicalism that automatically presupposes fault or lack of worthiness on our part when something goes wrong? Yes, I know that we are sinful. Boy, do I know it. But what about REDEMPTION??? What about a new heart? Isn’t that what God promises us?

I’m angry right now. I’m angry at leaders. I’m angry at bible teachers. I’m angry at churches. I’m angry because AGAIN, I see the result of preaching/teaching from the standpoint of the fall, and not the standpoint of new creation/new earth/new man. No, we are not there, but God is working it out. We, as the church, are the vision of that new creation, we are the foreshadowing of that. Yet we do not talk about that, we talk about only our sin, only our unworthiness. No wonder the church is so ineffective. Why should we be anything but?

I don’t know why these things happen. I don’t know why children get sick or die. I don’t know why events converge in such a way that a sweet, wonderful, kind and loving woman is pushed to a breaking point. I do know we live in a fallen world with it’s sickness, heartbreak and pain. I do know that every day brings us one day closer to New Heavens and New Earth. I do know God’s grace is more compelling and more powerful than our failures.

Fall into God’s grace and mercy, Lisa. It’s the one sure thing we have.