I know someone whose...
I know someone whose life is a mental and emotional maelstrom. She has no control over the raging winds of emotional and mental change that sweep over her. The best she can do is guzzle down the prescribed medicine and stay alive even while she inflicts on herself numerous little “suicides”. She can’t be depended on for any length of time to do the “normal” things; she knows she’s “a burden” to her loving family and she’s pretty well “useless” when it comes to congregational programs of outreach and edification.
She simply can’t understand why God would keep her around. Why doesn’t he just end her and relieve her of terror and pain and the world of having to bear with her? She’s filled with protest and tears and pleas for release and at other times with pleas for liferather than tortured existence.
But she cannot because she will not and will not because she cannot turn from God! In her lucid moments she reaffirms her trust in him!
She reminds me of a man I read about whose life was agony, whose pain was excruciating, whose confusion was complete and whose hot protest never ended from morning until night. Drunks sang songs about him, children mocked him, acquaintances avoided him and friends ladled out irrelevant teaching and advice. But would he quit; would he walk away from God? Not if the stars fell from heaven and the ground opened up and swallowed him whole!
He hated his existence, wished God would end it and yet, even more, he wanted the days back when he and God were friends and life proved it. No doubt there were those that looked at him and thought him useless and certainly some of his advisors thought him a positive blot on God’s good name, a stumbling-block to other people. But when the entire story was told it was this man that God brought out into the light and gloried in.
Job might have told God, “You know there were times when you made it hard for me to believe in you.” If he had, God might have said, “That’s interesting, for you always made it easy for me to believe in you.”
I think one of these days that God will bring that woman I know out into the light and show her off as one of his treasures and triumphs of grace. I do believe that!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.