What on earth is God doing?

I have watched crisis work its way through countless lives. Maybe my own crises have sensitised me to it. More recently I observed from afar how a whole city struggled through the collective crisis of a flood - I refer to the city of Nashville, Tennessee where a major storm front dumped over 15 inches of rain in 48 hours. The resulting flood devastated many parts of the city, especially more vulnerable wooden structures. Yet, reporting and human optimism minimised the crisis to the point where I naively considered it be just a major storm. The people of that city had chosen their own response to their crisis and opted to work it out through community.

I have watched families face parallel crises and respond quite differently. One of my life crises was recurring or parallel. The two crises hit me in different ways and my response was unique to each. In the first crisis I withdrew, in the second I displayed all the classic symptoms of crisis - anger, denial, etc. Don't let anyone ply you with patronising gestures about how you ought to process your own crises - we are all different and no two crises are the same, so we must face our own journey and manage our personal responses.

Many have argued that crisis is God's little way of shaping our characters and preparing us for something else. We assume that He has no interest in our comfort, only our character. I am not sure I see that anymore. I have found that He is generally more ready and willing to restore and redeem than I am ready to accept. He is a redemptive God and will find excuses to restore us. The problem is that our minds get in the way and distort our perspective of His heart, His grace and His promises.

He may allow crisis to hit us, but as C S Lewis said, it is His megaphone to speak into our dark worlds - hey we even allow similar crises to play out in our children's lives so that they can grow up. God does not induce crisis to make things worse, but to reveal how bad things really are. Marriages can stumble along in terrible ruts for years, even decades until a crisis drags the partners out of their tedium into reality, so that God can heal, not destroy. The same principle applies to our personal lives and how we allow such precious lives to lapse into tragic rhythms and ruts that preclude us from the greater purpose of God. That predicts an eventual crisis, for our mindsets and life learnings are just so befuddled by sin that we must inevitably face our own comeuppance - for our own sakes.

What I have come to see is that Jesus really did do enough for us, but the blessedness that He secured at the cross lies beyond the veil of reason - it represents a short distance, but a long journey, by which our minds are transformed until we can see Him as He is - the lover of our souls. He has not moved the prize away or changed our wages, we have merely fallen short of grace, but God will persist with us until we reach our promised rest.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net