New Living Translation My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, says the LORD. And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. Praying for these families at this time of the morning. Okay, Lord, truly, your ways are FAR BEYOND ANYthing I could imagine. Quotes from author, Phillip Yancey, author of book, Where is God When It Hurts? when he addressed the student body at Virginia Tech after the mass shooting & killing on that campus....truth revealed: I would like to promise you a long, pain-free life, but I cannot. God has not promised us that. Rather, the Christian view of the world reduces everything to this formula: The world is good. The world has fallen. The world will be redeemed. Creation, the Fall, Redemption—thats the Christian story in a nutshell. You know that the world is good. Look around you at the blaze of spring in the hills of Virginia. Look around you at the friends you love. Though overwhelmed with grief right now, you will learn to laugh again, to play again, to climb up mountains and kayak down rivers again, to love, to rear children. The world is good. You know, too, that the world has fallen....you know that as acutely as anyone on this planet. I ask you also to trust that the world, your world, will be redeemed. This is not the world God wants nor is satisfied with. God has promised a time when evil will be defeated, when events like the shootings at Nickel Mines and Columbine and Virginia Tech will come to an end. More, God has promised that even the scars we accumulate on this fallen planet will be redeemed, as Jesus demonstrated to Thomas (New Testament)... ...I would like to promise you an end to pain and grief, a guarantee that you will never again hurt as you hurt now. I cannot. I can, however, stand behind the promise that the Apostle Paul made in Romans 8, that all things can be redeemed, can work together for your good. In another passage, Paul spells out some of the things he encountered, which included beatings, imprisonment, and shipwreck. As he looked back, he could see that somehow God had redeemed even those crisis events in his life. ...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us, Paul concluded. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:37-39). Gods love is the foundational truth of the universe. Trust a God who can redeem what now seems unredeemable.... Honor the grief you feel. The pain is a way of honoring those who died...It represents life and love. The pain will fade over time, but it will never fully disappear. Do not attempt healing alone. The real healing, of deep connective tissue, takes place in community. Where is God when it hurts? Where Gods people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and on this earth, the Messiah takes form in the shape of his church. Thats what the Body of Christ means. Finally, cling to the hope that nothing that happens, not even this terrible tragedy, is irredeemable. We serve a God who has vowed to make all things new. J. R. R. Tolkien once spoke of joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. You know well the poignancy of grief. As healing progresses, may you know, too, that joy, a foretaste of the world redeemed.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 07:07:43 +0000
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