STORMS OF ADVERSITIES

If I have built my life house upon a rock, am I exempt from the bumps and bruises and brokenness that afflict the foolish builders upon sand? No, both experience the same atmospheric phenomenon—rains, floods, and winds beating upon our houses. If I have tried to live a just life, do the refreshing rains fall only upon my fields of endeavor and leave the fields of the unjust in drought? No, God sends His rain impartially on the just and the unjust.

So it is with adversities. Emotional, relational, and physical storms at times inundate all of us. They are inevitable and part of the human condition. Life can't be lived without the push and pull of adversity. We will be assaulted either from without or from within or both.

Adversity, however, is meant to be faced and conquered with God's help. Adversities come upon us in many guises and at any age, but seem to pummel us thick and fast when we are in our summit season. When we carry the weight of many years and have shouldered daily cares for a lifetime, we are weary, weaker, and more vulnerable. If we are not anchored in our faith, we can find ourselves on a slippery slide into despair. Our confidence-anchor is Jesus' own promise in John 17 that He is interceding for us. 

 

If we have lived any length of years, we are sure to have encountered storms in each of our life seasons. Early spring storms, summer gully-washers with their pyrotechnics, the sudden wind storms during the chill of autumn, and frigid blizzard winter storms—all have their human life analogies. Young trees with tender roots not yet tenaciously anchored are often felled by the ferociousness of hurricane winds. “Even the youths shall faint and grow weary, and young men shall utterly fall,” Isaiah declared. Sturdy oaks whose growth took scores of years to attain maturity are nevertheless also uprooted in a tornado.

Sometimes adversities come in the form of unanswered prayers or the disappointments or disillusionments of life. We may receive a no from our loving God in response to our earnest plea to be rescued from some situation or to our desperate cry to be healed. An avalanche of noes may accumulate over a lifetime and seem poised to bury us like a gigantic mud slide. Whether we recognize it or not, when God says no to some of our desires or pleas, that is as much an answer to our prayers as a yes. Life is made up of both shadows and sunshine: the generous yeses of God and the merciful, loving noes which we may mistakenly view as misfortunes but which are in reality gardens of our growth.

We may feel that our life story has become too dark to turn another page. We dread today and wish we could skip what it might contain. But a great book requires every page, and God is writing a unique story in each of our lives. If we try to flip through and omit those seemingly negative portions of our life story, we will lose the beautiful continuity of God's work in our lives through adversity.

(An excerpt from Leona's forthcoming book, Chapter: Storms on My Summit)