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)
