Deeper Than Life Hurts
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday with your family and friends. Here’s a little music to accompany today’s musings.
Part of my New Year’s Resolution for 2011 is to set my alarm and wake up early. I am a morning person, so it’s not too difficult for me – I’m just a little out of practice.
This morning as I sat down with a cup of tea, I pondered the way God has repeatedly used loneliness to draw me to him. I’m not sure that “loneliness” is the right word, or that it quite captures what I’m trying to describe. It’s more a sense of “existential angst”, for lack of a better phrase – something we can all get in touch with if we’re able to slow down and unplug. I have the luxury of doing this quite a bit, and paradoxically, it allows me to feel the pain of my loneliness.
Conventional wisdom might say, “you need to get out more”, and perhaps I do. But I’m not talking about loneliness in that sense. We weren’t created for this world. No matter how much damage living in it has done to us, at the core we were made for something different – something better. Our DNA contains God’s original plan for an unbroken, eternal relationship with himself and each other. The loneliness I feel is not really about my unmarried state or introverted personality. It’s a deep longing for home.
I’ve been aware of this longing since I was a little girl. As an adult, it drove me to seek solace in all sorts of unhealthy ways. But it also drove me into the arms of Jesus. I knew he was the part of my heart that I had been looking for everywhere else.
Following Christ hasn’t been a completely smooth, linear path, at least for me. I have continued to struggle in some areas of weakness – substance abuse, low self-esteem and people pleasing, to name some of them. Most of the Christians I’ve hung out with over the years have believed that because God heals, we can overcome completely every struggle and weakness if we have enough faith.
I believe God can do anything. But if he took away all my struggles and weaknesses, I wouldn’t need him anymore. And if he healed me completely, every time, I would never go home.
I think knowing Jesus is almost like an appetizer. The full course meal, an eternity in Heaven with him, is yet to come. It’s there that I will be fully healed and fully restored. No more pain, no more tears, no more loneliness.
In Romans 8, Paul’s words speak to this issue. I would love to quote the whole chapter, but you can read it here if you like.
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:18-25)
Sometimes the things we consider negative are actually an expression of God’s love for us. I think my loneliness falls into this category. It’s so easy to forget that this world is not our home, and God’s purposes are higher than our desire to avoid pain.
If we could see our sorrow through your eyes,
we’d understand the blessing in disguise.
For you call blessed what we consider cursed,
and your love goes deeper than life hurts.(“Deeper Than Life Hurts”, © 2010, Sandy Alexander, SOCAN)
