Ripples of Redemption

I'm in a place of needing to reflect on the faithfulness of God in the tough places.  So here it goes...

About two years ago, our case of Selah's injury came to a close.  (If you'd like to read a bit more about that, go to my "God gives us 'just enough' trials.' entry from October 2016)  It was one of the most terrifying times of my life.  I genuinely thought that just surviving it would be enough.  Just make it through the social workers, parental observations, lawyers, family scheduling for 24/7 care and such.  If I just survived it, if my family survived it, I trusted that the faithfulness of God would be seen in it, even as hard as it was.  I could tell you story after story of the grace of God in it, from the crisis intervention guy from the state calling us a "pleasure" to work with because we treated him respectfully in the middle of our grief, to finding favor with our parental supervisors, to friends and family coming through in the clutch, to so much more.  I thought that the steadfast faith God gave me, Him being the glue that held us together, the grace we got to be to those around us, I really thought that was enough.

God had so much more in mind.

This past summer, I went to my counseling class that was on campus at Liberty University for my working toward Marriage and Family Therapy degree.  It was a skills class, and one of the classmates who was my faux "counselor" to practice the skills, was a great listener to my story.  She remained calm but reflected my emotions well, which was what we were trying to do.  However, she told me afterward that she had to contain herself because her sister just happened to have gone through the exact same thing that we did just months earlier.  There was an unexplained injury to her sister's child, her sister had to be watched and interrogated, and my classmate's faith felt completely shattered at an unfair situation. However, after hearing my story and how God held us together in all the anguish, she told me she believed she needed to meet me and God had designed it.  She saw the strength God has provided in the middle of the injustice of our situation, and that I came out on the other side not bitter or angry.  Yes, I still have residual fear of bringing my kids into the doctor for small injuries (as part of the aftermath of that situation), but the Lord was my anchor.  She said it was amazing that I had experienced the same kind of duress as her sister experience, but could hear and see how God kept me close through it all, and she desperately needed to see that after watching her sister's hardships.

If that experience weren't enough, two weeks ago I had to go to church to get my staff photo taken for the church's website, and one of the other staff members asked if I was going to the staff meeting after and I said I couldn't because of having the kids and no sitter.  Her daughter offered to watch them and I was so excited to be able to go and just feel connected to the whole staff.  However, at the meeting I originally was not supposed to be at, there was an announcement that an Iraqi acquaintance of our church had gotten in touch with a staff member because, lo and behold, they had an unexplained injury to their child and were being investigated by social services.  I was stunned.  I immediately raised my hand and briefly said I had experienced the same type of issues a couple of years ago and I would love to talk with them about my experience and see if I could offer support.  By God's grace, I ended up being able to meet with the family that evening and was able to explain my story to them and help guide them in their understanding and what to expect from the situation.  They were grateful and I ended up being able to prepare them for their meeting with the social worker last week.  Because of our preparation together they knew what to expect and remained calm during the entire process of being told they would have to be supervised with their children like we were.  They ended up in tears, absolutely understandable and expected, but their anger had tapered off as they understood more of what was coming.  I will end up stopping by their home to check on them in the future and hope to build a relationship with them and be a light of the Gospel to them as well.

God is good.  He is faithful.  He saw these needs of these families before the creation of the world and wanted these families to see Himself, so He redeems my story yet again.

On another note, before I had met my husband, I had a boyfriend before him for a year and half.  He was a young man trying to re-prioritize, get his life back on track, and struggling with who he wanted to be.  He was kind to me, helped me see I was more capable than I believed myself to be, and was overall good to me.  However, he always struggled with commitment and once I moved an hour away, our relationship fell apart and he cheated on me.  This was one of those things that I genuinely thought would never happen to me.  I was in my mid-20s and as loyal as they come.  I thought no one would ever cheat on me because I was such a faithful person (naïve, I know, but it's what I thought).  I didn't know how to process this and the residual effect afterward.  I met my husband shortly after that, and we were married a year later.  My scars from that time did make me a little untrusting at times, but overall, I thought my resilience from the situation was the point.  The Lord held me together as I fell apart, an important thing I held on to as I struggled with things from Selah's situation, and I felt that was all I needed to learn.

About the end of the Selah situation, we moved here to the home we now reside in.  We met our young neighbor from behind us, but didn't know much about him.  But all over time, his story was eerily reminiscent of my ex's story.  He was from the same town in MN, he had a tattoo of MN on his body too, he was a young man who used to party but was now about 5 hours away from home, he goes back to visit his "friends" but doesn't really feel connected with them anymore as he's starting to mature, and the list goes on and on.  If I had met my ex in his early 20s, our neighbor would have been a lot like him.  Trying to find his way, yet feeling so lost at the same time.  As I put the pieces together, I about cried.  In all of my heartache at the time in 2011, I never would have dreamed that in 2017, I'd be having a deep conversation with another young man so similar to him.  I remembered with so much empathy the pain my ex was going through trying to figure out where he was going, and I walked into the conversation a few weeks ago with my neighbor with so much compassion that he couldn't believe how well I understood him and his stories.  He also was attentive to my couple of insights and questions as I listened to him, because he felt so understood by me.  I had no idea that God would use my struggle, my heartache, my anger, and my redemption to be able to manifest itself in His Love for my neighbor. 

God has shown that he saw my neighbor's struggles years before he would be struggling.  He already had a plan to show him Grace by using my story SIX YEARS LATER to point my neighbor toward Redemption...I promise you, Jesus sees your story too.  He loves you and has plans to point you toward himself, and he may use your heartache to change someone else's life too.  You never know how God is working behind the scenes, both in you and on your behalf.  Trust Him, He will carry you.

2 Corinthians 1:3-5
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

We so often lean on the words of "comfort" used in this set of verses.  But I'd like to remind us, in verse 5 it says, "For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings..."  My friends, we will suffer.  Jesus guarantees it in the Gospel.  We don't get to get out of this life scar-free.  We just don't.  He will work miracles, He will rescue us at times.  But many times He won't.  He will walk with us through our pain and suffering and the pain reminds us that:
1)  This world is not our home.
2)  Sin has really broken this world.
3)  We have to lean INTO Him and not away from Him, for He is the Everlasting Hope

Romans 8:28 is a commonly misunderstood verse about "All things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose." When this verse is actually put into it's correct context when you realize the entire passage is about an Eternal Redemption.  Put in it's proper situation within the passage, it does NOT promise that you will get "better things down the road."  That is completely off the mark of the actual passage.  We are GUARANTEED suffering in this life by Jesus himself and throughout the New Testament and we are not ever promised in Scripture things will get better in this life.  We are not, ever.  I wish we were.  When bad things happen though, Romans 8 reminds us that in Eternity, things will be set right.  Our relationship with God and to each other will be as it should be.  The things we went through in this life will be redeemed through the work of the cross.  We will get to watch on the precipice of our lives and look over it and see God's handiwork throughout the course of our ups and downs.  And we will fall on our knees in our newly rectified bodies and give all glory for the Tapestry of Life God has made for us individually and corporately to Him that wove the Tapestry in the first place. 

I'm sorry I can't guarantee health, marriage, happiness, the right jobs, etc. to anyone reading this...but at the same time, I'm not completely sorry...because I guarantee you, as C.S. said that God whispers through tangible blessings but pain is His megaphone.  It shows how broken we are and the world is without Him and He beckons us to return to Him.  He doesn't want the pain for us, but it reminds us of why rejecting Him is such a painfully broken way to live.  He wants us to return to Him.

I wanted to reflect on how God has used my pain to bring hope to others, because I, like the nation of Israel, have "spiritual amnesia."  I don't reflect on God's faithfulness as often as I wish I would.  It's such a place of solace, that even in our broken places...not only does He see our pain, but He will use it to bring others closer to Himself.  And as the Apostle Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

If we are struggling now, may we fix our eyes on the eternal, knowing that even if we don't see justice and peace now, we are guaranteed we Ultimately will.

If God has graced us with perseverance to move to a new season beyond the affliction, may we be attentive to who He puts in our path that we may give light and hope to as we have experienced His "comfort" and so desire to pass that "comfort" on that we have seen.