In life, we sometimes have experiences that we simply can’t describe. We do our best to capture the moment into words, but somehow words won’t do it justice. Sometimes the words can’t capture the awe, beauty, love and unbelievable circumstances: things like the birth of a child, the moment your wife said “I Do”, the wondrous beauty of nature, or the Cubs winning the World Series. Sometimes the circumstances were so bad that we can’t figure out how to illustrate the pain and horror of a moment: things like the loss of a loved one, divorce from a child’s viewpoint, fighting in a war, or your team losing the World Series to the Cubs! Maybe it is something much simpler, an experience that was really funny but somehow when you tell the story the humor just doesn’t shine through, which always leads to the phrase, “Well, I guess you just had to be there.” Words are a wonderful tool for communication and to share our experiences with others; however, there are times when they just don’t seem to be enough. Such is the problem that I face in this post. I am going to try to explain and describe something that I don’t think I can explain in whole. I hope that I am able to come close enough that if you have had a similar experience, you will understand what I mean and if you haven’t, you will at least be intrigued by what I have put in front of you.
Do you know those moments when life just seems to run over you like a semi? I mean things may be going great for you and then, in what seems like an instant, everything is changed. It could be something as simple as a teenager being dumped and their whole life is over, maybe you lost a job and can’t pay your mortgage or sadly for some it is the moment that their child or parent died. You literally feel the air being sucked out of your lungs. You want to scream and cry but somehow you have no voice. You have just gone from a world of sunshine and rainbows into what seems like a dark and dreary alternate reality: a world that has lost its color, hope and beauty. The irony is that when we were in the world of sunshine and rainbows, you didn’t really take the time to appreciate them and probably didn’t even recognize that they were there. But now they are gone and your heart aches at the absence.
It may not happen in an instant; sometimes it is everything piling up at once. You get a flat tire, then your kid gets sick, then your refrigerator dies and it’s November, so you still need to go Christmas shopping. I certainly wouldn’t say that these circumstances are worse than the first, but they do come with a different set of emotions. You don’t get the wind knocked out of you like you did in the first example; instead you just slowly feel more and more exhausted. Like you are in a fight and just getting beat down round after round. You have the air to scream but after a certain point, you just don’t want to. You don’t see the point. You see the world as a harsh cruel place. It is against you and you aren’t good enough or important enough to fight back.
I’m sure that we have all been run over by life at least once. I’ve been there many times myself, but what about when, instead of disaster, it is grace that hits you like a ton of bricks? Have you ever experienced that? In my life, it has typically come when I was in the darkest moments of my life and then all of a sudden it’s like God shows up in an explosion of love that is almost too much to bear. I have been in the dark so long and either ignoring God or just slowly losing faith in what God would do for me that when He shows up in a big way it is almost painful. It isn’t painful in the same way as before, since my life is actually getting better. It is painful because I am forced to look at who I am and what I did. I allowed myself to be pulled away from God. I allowed myself to be separated from my Lord and Savior. I doubted my Heavenly Father and to see just how unworthy I am in the moment of his grace brings tears of both joy and pain.
I need to know my weaknesses and I need to be able to understand where I went wrong. So to some extent it is good that I am able to recognize that I pulled away from God, but here’s the thing, God didn’t light up the darkness to illuminate my failures. He did it to rescue me, because I am precious in His sight. I slipped into the darkness because I was only focused on myself and my pain and here I am now, the pain is gone and I am still focused only on me. Before Satan was whispering in my ear that God didn’t love me and that He wasn’t truly all-powerful and I fell for it. However, now God has shown up and He has proven that He does love me and that He can do anything. So, Satan has changed gears to tell me that I am not good enough and that I don’t deserve God’s love. Guess what! I’m falling for it, again.
Here’s the truth, life is tough; it’s going to get you down from time to time, and as humans our natural tendency is to take the path of least resistance. We naturally focus on what we can see and what we can do. I’m not saying it is right or that it works in our best interest, but it is what we naturally lean towards. It is a good thing to recognize that you got off track and to learn from that and be strengthened by it, but you must also recognize that you didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. Read the bible and you will find lots of examples where people were so focused on themselves and their problems that they lost sight of God. As a matter of fact, go and read Exodus; Israel is being led out Egypt, saved from slavery. God is literally lighting their way and still they consistently lose sight of God and find things to complain about. Learn from it, but don’t beat yourself up over it.
There are times that the grace of God seems to crash into me like a locomotive. Just like a disaster, it can take the breath out of me and leave me reeling a little bit trying to understand what happened. I know that I tend to get into a state where I just expect everything to go wrong. I assume that since I had a bad day the last three days that I’m going to have a bad day the next three days. I start to feel like people don’t care about me and that nothing, absolutely nothing, can actually help me and pull me out of the mess that I am in. So when God actually shows up and fixes it all for me, it is a complete shock. How did God do this? Why would he waste His time on me? It must be a mistake; this wasn’t meant for me. It actually takes me time, sometimes hours or even days, to accept it. I won’t speak for anyone else, but sometimes I spend so much time in my own depression and self-pity that the truth is: no matter how much it hurts me I don’t want to leave and no matter how much I hate it it’s where I’m the most comfortable.
I can sit in the darkness so long that it becomes my only friend and wallow in the pain until I let it define me. Once I let it define me, I get to a point where I actually start to believe that if you want to help me with my pain than you don’t love me for me, which means I don’t need you. It’s not that I like the pain, but in a strange way I get to a place, where I depend on it. I know what to expect with pain, there aren’t any surprises, I can’t get blindsided, or let down. I do want to get better, but I don’t really think that I can so I am not going to take any drastic measures to make it happen. It is sort of like a kid taking off a band-aid. If you let the kid do it they will take it off as slowly as possible, which really only makes the pain last longer but somehow they still prefer it to ripping it off and getting it all over with. As I struggle and remain in the darkness I know that I can always turn to God and let Him help me kind of like putting antiseptic on a wound, but that would bring the sting of guilt as I start to recognize how I turned my back on Him. So instead I just let the pain fester and it starts to infect more and more of my life. When God finally comes in and sets things right, it is sort of like setting a dislocated shoulder. There is instant relief but you are still sore as you begin to deal with your loss in a healthy way.
The punch to the gut that often comes from God showing up in a huge way can cause a lot of guilt and self doubt if you let it. Satan will be right there to make you feel guilty and ashamed that God had to come to help you. He will tell you that you have failed again and that God has helped you despite His disappointment. If you choose to believe his lies, he will slowly eat away at you until you feel like you need to hide and cover yourself before God. You won’t want to speak to your Heavenly Father because you can’t bear to face your own shame. However, there is a truth that Satan is trying to hide from you. Do you know what it really means when you mess up? It means you are human. Do you know what it really means when God has to come to your rescue? It means you are just like every other Christian in the history of the world. God isn’t shaking his head in disappointment; He isn’t wondering how in the world you messed up this bad. He is doing exactly what any loving father would do when his child falls and hurts himself. He is picking you, brushing off the dirt, healing the wounds, and hugging you to stop the tears. There is no disappointment in that moment, just an amazing, healing love.
There is another feeling that can come from God’s grace if you ignore Satan’s lies; an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder. It will still leave you breathless and speechless, but it will be because you know there’s no way to describe the power of God. This is what it feels like to be loved by an all mighty God. This is what it is like to be cherished by the King of Kings. This is what it feels like to be precious in the sight of the Lord of Lords. This is what it feels like to be healed by our Redeemer. This is what it is like to be protected by the Perfect Lamb. This is what it feels like to be a CHRISTIAN!!!
