Is God in the demolition business?

So if God does have plans for our lives, plans to do us good and not harm us, why are so many in trouble. I have never seen as many believers in crisis as now. We are in an economic, relational, physical and emotional battlefield. Has God lost control? Many of those I speak to even say He is unusually silent in their lives right now? Has He led us into a wilderness to die there?

Well, let me say I am not a theorist. I have faced a series of life-class crises over the last twenty years, which led me to write on the subject of crisis. Right now my family is scraping the bottom of the barrel, wondering how we will see out the next few months. We may have lost much, but gained much more. As Paul said: “For me to die is gain and so I count all things but dross for the surpassing knowledge of Christ”.

Through those years I wrote and wrote and wrote, until God started making sense. One of the great lessons of that journey is that God is not in the demolition business, but in the restoration business. We are in crisis, not because God put us there but because we were born into it. Life anaesthetizes us and helps us to live in a pseudo reality, so we can survive. Yet, in truth, the distortion of reality works in Satan’s favor. As long as he can keep feeding us with distractions we will not confront the essence of our crisis.

Instead we clothe ourselves with inadequate fig leaves (some even have metallic BMW badges on, others look like houses and others yet have the outer guise of achievement). However, they still don’t cover the reality beneath. I have seen enough of life to know that even the most seemingly victorious and independent individuals have their own personal demons. No one is immune – sin it is that contagious.

So why does God keep silent about it all? Actually He is very vocal. We are just hard of hearing. Bette Midler sang, “God is watching from a distance”. She is half right – He lifted Himself above us all and watched, from a distance of a few feet, as he hung above a wretched world. He said little, but spoke much about our real crisis. It’s a crisis of the soul. The first crisis of Adam and Eve was self awareness – and it is with us today. Marketers exploit it, bankers love it, alcohol and drugs are attracted to it, sickness follows it, marriages fall becauseof it and the world is loveless as a result.

Sure God seems silent – because silence is His blackboard, but crisis is His megaphone to speak into our deaf worlds. He is there – He always was and always will be. We are just looking in the wrong places and missing Him for all our looking.

(c) Peter eleazar @ http://www.4u2live.net/