Great Carpenter

God has been teaching me and growing my faith in Him immensely lately. One of the ways that I see Him growing my faith is in suffering. Actually, right now, I would actually say I definitely am NOT in a season of suffering. I do not feel under trial, and I am not dealing with heartbreak right now. But, I have had a broken heart before, and I have been tested, and the gold of my life has come out purer for it. But what I am coming aware of is that there is a whole lot of brokenness in this world, and there are so many people suffering. And it breaks my heart. There is so much that just doesn’t seem fair. So much that I just look to the sky and say “Lord, why? I mean I know it’s not my pain, but wow I hate seeing others in pain.” I have friends and people I care about who are dealing with stuff, but I also see injustice in the lives of people I have never even met. Natural disasters. Cancer. Famine. Sick, struggling babies. Abuse. Persecution. Horrible, oppressive governments and laws. Shootings. And then all the things criminals do, and even despite best police efforts, get away with sometimes.

I look around that I think “Why?” And then when the question hits closer to home, effecting people I love or me, I ask the question even louder, with a lot of frustration and sometimes fear in my voice. In my finite abilities I cannot wrap my mind on why God would allow such heartbreak to happen when He is Able to stop them. It doesn’t seem right. And God’s okay with that. He knows what He knows, and He doesn’t need my approval.

I guess I take comfort in the fact that God knows. He knows. He knows His reasons. He knows the pain. He knows your life. He knows your story. He knows the big picture. I have been doing a Bible study that has been blessing and challenging me in more ways I can even keep tabs on. One of the things that Beth Moore said in one of the lessons (and she knows what she’s talking about, speaking from much personal experience in dealing with much pain in life, simultaneously walking in faith and freedom) was “If God, in His sovereignty sees suffering in our lives that can be used for the salvation of the lost, the edification of the body of Christ, and His own Glorification it could get permission.” And I believe that is a filter and a test that is used. Before there is a heartbreak allowed, God will not allow it unless it can be used for one, if not all, of those reasons. Personally, in my own life, I take comfort in that, praying that He was glorified and others were drawn to Him in being transparent with my difficulties. We are not pawns to God. You and I are joint heirs with Christ. That means He cares as much about you and I as He does Christ. Overwhelming. It seems impossible huh? For anyone else, it would be. Because He cares as much for us as He cares for His own Son, He will not allow us to suffer without a reason. Christ suffered greatly, but it was for a cause, and passion – you and I. Just like Christ, our suffering is never in vain, never without a passion and cause we can put behind it, but we must let God Heal.

Another one of the huge blessings I’m awakening to, even as we draw close to Easter, is the suffering Christ handled. If there were anyone who should have been spared it should have been Jesus. If there was anyone that suffered, more than any human thought possible, it was Jesus. – The great paradox of His love. Let’s see okay. First, the guy was pretty poor, “just” a Carpenter. Imagine allowing yourself to become poor when all You’ve known is the unequalled riches of Heaven, and inheritance of Your Father? Scripture gives the idea that He was basically homeless. Imagine being homeless when all You knew was the neighborhoods of Heavens loaded with Mansions…A whole Kingdom? He was unhealthy. He got sick, bruised, scraped, sprained, dislocated and especially in the end of His life all sorts of messed up –for us. Imagine giving up Your spotless health when all You knew was healing and wholeness of Heaven? He limited Himself to time. Imagine. When You are Eternal, totally outside of time, and your now choosing to limit yourself to time. And the closeness of His father – He was torn away, rejected by His father…so we wouldn’t be. And only some of that is suffering we would even identify with. But even all that didn’t end Christ’s suffering. People actually hated Him so much they wanted Him dead. (Hopefully nobody reading this gets what that’s like) He had people he deeply knew and loved die. He knew loss. He was betrayed – not just betrayed, but betrayed by one of his best friends. He suffered rejection. He was lonely – there was nobody who would ever be able to quite understand Him. He was totally misunderstood. He knew the pain of human life. Even on the cross, He had to watch people who He loved and cared about in the worst pain they had ever dealt with, nailed to the cross, unable to comfort them. He went through the worst, most torturous death imaginable, that anyone has ever experienced. He went through Hell to conquer death and come victorious over death and Hell. THEN HE ROSE.

My point is this: your pain is real. Life is hard. Sometimes I really don’t like how life gets. It actually isn’t fair sometimes. I get that. I’m sorry to say, I really have no answers for you. I don’t know why bad things have to happen to good people, why people have to hurt so much they think it will kill them, or why injustice seems to have the upper hand constantly. But I can take comfort in this: There is no place you can go Christ hasn’t gone. There is no pain you can feel that Christ hasn’t felt. There is no loss so deep that Christ hasn’t experienced. I believe God when His word promises me NOTHING can separate us – including a discrepancy between my pain and His pain. In fact, not only to I believe He suffered to every extent possible, I believe all His suffering was exponentially higher and more intense than anything you or I will suffer. So He knows it well. He had to know our pain even better than we know our pain to know how to heal it. Just like as a doctor has to know your body and how it works better than we know our own bodies in many senses, so they can help us get well. That was the point of Christ’s suffering, He suffered with us to bring healing. Christ was a Carpenter for His job – he rebuilt broken things. How symbolic, and appropriate. The only thing possibly more appropriate would have been a doctor. But that wasn’t simple or unassuming enough for Jesus. So he was a Great Repairer. I don’t know much, or have many answers. But this I know, as Corrie TenBoom once said “No pit is so deep that He is not deeper still.” I also know that He cares more about your heart and your pain than even you do yourself.