VideoBlog: "Developing a Steady Confidence" --Jim Robbins

The irrational hope of suffering

Many of my friends, and even my own family, are going through exceptionally hard times these days.  We're wondering why God seems to be indifferent, almost callous.  God seems to treat us in a way we'd never treat our own friends and family.  My wife and I are questioning every major decision we've made in the last 2 years, wondering if God's promise was a joke.

Would you allow your son to feel abandoned?  You're daughter to experience unrelieved pain?

I'm pretty good at trusting God when I know what he's asking me to risk.  If I'm unmistakeably hearing his counsel, I know he intends on rescue in one way or another.  But when I can't hear a thing - no direction, no counsel, no One ... It is then that trust is forced into a deeper place:

Will you trust me when you hear nothing -- when the knock on the door isn't answered.  When the storehouse is barren.  When the promise feels like a slap across the face?

I'm learning that the only way to move from a theology of hope and trust, to a quake-proof, threat-defying confidence is to let it play out.  Remember:  things are not always what they appear to be.  Our assumptions about what is going on may be inaccurate.  We need to let this play out so that the confidence Jesus had in the bow of the boat being bullied by wave and wind becomes ours.  We need this trial so that the goodness of God's heart - deeply for us -  can be exposed:

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.  - John Stuart Mill

This isn't a stone-hearted dismissal of loss and pain, the kind of unaffected counsel Job's friends offered him.   Rather, know that I'm heart-sick at the level of suffering some of my dear friends and those closest to me are experiencing.  My own family feels tossed about like a dog's chew toy --  Daily rage against unanswered prayer, tears wept as I stand behind my house hunched over in abandonment.  

Then there are the fleeting moments of ever-increasing strength.  A growing noble courage I don't think I've ever felt before. 

My hope is being coaxed, hardened and honed because of the suffering, and not in spite of it.  I don't want to cower before every threatening cloud.  I don't want to be tossed about by every wind:  but I will be unless I allow this chapter in the story to summon a strength that is becoming indominable, not fooled by circumstance and reason.

Share your story.

Update on Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 10:14AM by Jim Robbins

I wrote this post, not to engender a self-indulgent pity for myself or our family -- though I'm deeply grateful for the compassionate concern my friends have shown.  And, we're grateful for the prayers.

Rather, I wrote it to offer some perspective as one processing his own pain, and what it means to trust - almost irrationally -- God's heart in the middle of it.  I hope it's helpful to others who are "taking up the sufferings of Christ."

You are not alone. 

VideoBlog - How experiences can color our perceptions

The erosion of confidence

"You'll never find the life you're looking for."

...But the sabotage begins with the painful accumulation of thoughts like these:

•  "I didn't think it would turn out like this."
•  "I'm tired of getting hurt.  Maybe it's not worth it."
•  "I know you want this for me, God; but how long, Lord.  How long must it take?!"

It is hard, and it does hurt.  A person can get to the point where the only apparent conclusion is: "I'll never find what I'm looking for-- Why do others find the life they want, but I can't? Did I blow it somewhere? Is God angry?  Am I not hearing him?" And once the lies begin to calcify, some part of our heart begins to shut down. Faith, hope, and love drain out of the cheerless and weary heart.

But it feels so true. Our experience of pain can erode our confidence and hope in a way that only our experience of the moment feels true to us -- All other interpretations of reality get blotted out.  Only the subjective is allowed to be true, and any Perspective that stands outside of us is forgotten.  Faith, hope and love give way to tunnel vision... and something in us dies.

"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives"  - Albert Schweitzer

Jesus, what do you know about our Father's heart here that I need to know?  Where does your confidence come from?