“Yet every advantage that I had gained I considered lost for Christ’s sake. Yes, and I look upon everything as loss compared with the overwhelming gain of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For his sake I did in actual fact suffer the loss of everything, but I considered it useless rubbish compared with being able to win Christ. For now my place is in him, and I am not dependent upon any of the self-achieved righteousness of the Law. God has given me that genuine righteousness which comes from faith in Christ. How changed are my ambitions! Now I long to know Christ and the power shown by his resurrection: now I long to share his sufferings, even to die as he died, so that I may perhaps attain as he did, the resurrection from the dead.”                                                                                              Phillips Translation of Philippians 3:10

As a counselor, I often have people ask me these questions: “Why do I have to go through this?”  “Is God punishing me for something?”  “What did I do that was so bad?”  “How long is this going to last?”  Let’s be honest, we have all asked these questions from time to time.  Sometimes these questions coincide with others: “Did God cause this to happen, allow it to happen or is it just a result of living in a fallen world?” “If God is good, why do bad things happen to His people?”

It is our human nature to want answers. It is also our human nature to want to rush through anything that is uncomfortable for us, to get to the other side as quickly as possible.  We prefer to learn lessons from watching others and through hind-sight and reflection.  And yet, it is often in sitting in our distress or suffering that we learn the most about God and about ourselves.  He has promised “to draw near to the broken hearted”.

We celebrate our faith on the mountaintop, but our faith grows in the fertile valley, where we come to the end of our self and realize that God is all we really have and all we need.  Often in our haste to get through it- we miss the opportunity to have Him draw close to us.  We can be so focused on our destination that we miss the lessons in the journey.  Paul, writing from prison, says he wants to “know Christ and the power” and to “share in his sufferings” Wewant to know the power of the resurrection, but we are not interested in the suffering!  And yet, we cannot have resurrection without death.  Death is painful.  Grief is painful. It is hard to let go of our expectations and trust that even in the midst of our pain “God is good”.  But it is what He calls us to do!  To come and die to ourselves, that we might be made worthy through suffering and attain the resurrection from the dead.  What do you need to die to?  What do you need to allow to die so that God can resurrect something better?

I am not sure which things God causes, allows or which things just happen because we live in a fallen world- but I do know that nothing escapes His notice and that because He is good, He will use the situation to teach us about His grace, to comfort us and to draw near to us.

So when the hard times come, and they will, but also in the good times – in every moment of your life and every situation be faithful to ask the questions “God, what do you want me to learn in this in this moment about myself and about you?  Don’t miss the blessing of the journey.

Shirley Chupp

Lean into Jesus Ministries

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