God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Grace Narratives

Countdown to God’s Healing: I’m excited to announce that BMH Books will release my fifth book in May. To read a sample section of God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting click here. To pre-order your autographed copy at 30% off, visit here. As we countdown to the release, I’ll be sharing periodic excerpts, such as today’s post: Grace Narratives.

Weaving Truth into Life

Life hurts. Wounds penetrate. Without grace narratives, hopelessness and bitterness flourish. With a grace narrative, hope and forgiveness flow and perspective grows.

Instead of our perspective shrinking, suffering is the exact time when we must listen most closely, when we must lean over to hear the whisper of God. True, God shouts to us in our pain, but His answers, as with Elijah, often come to us in whispered still small voices amid the thunders of the world.

In Genesis 45, Joseph discovers healing through God’s grace narrative. Further, he offers his brothers tastes of grace.

“And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been a famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt” (Genesis 45:5-8).

Amazing! I hope you caught the words. “To save lives,” “to preserve,” “by a great deliverance.” That’s a grace narrative, a salvation narrative. Had God not preserved a remnant of Abraham’s descendents, then Jesus would never have been born. Joseph uses his spiritual eyes to see God’s great grace purposes in saving not only Israel and Egypt, but also the entire world.

I hope you also caught Joseph’s repetition. “God sent me.” “God sent me ahead of you.” “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Joseph sees the smaller story of human scheming for ruin. However, he also perceives that God trumps that smaller scheme with His larger purpose by weaving beauty out of ugly.

In weaving, God heals our wounds as we envision a future even while all seems lost in the present. Grace narratives point the way to God’s larger story, assuring us that our Savior is worth our wait.

Grace Math: Divine Calculations

Healing wounds requires grace narratives and grace math. Grace math teaches us that present suffering plus God’s character equals future glory. The equation we use is the Divine perspective. From a Divine faith perspective on life, we erect a platform to respond to suffering. How we view life makes all the difference in how we respond to life’s losses. Martin Luther understood this. “The Holy Spirit knows that a thing only has such value and meaning to a man as he assigns it in his thoughts.”

We must reshape our interpretation of life by contemplating suffering from a new, grace perspective. Through God’s Word we nurture alternative ways to view life’s losses. The spiritual consolation offered by Scripture is a new vision, the power of faith to see suffering and death from the viewpoint of our crucified and risen Lord. It renews our sight and turns our common human view of matters upside down. This does not eradicate the pain or the fear of misery; it robs it of its hopelessness.

Our earth-bound, non-faith human story of suffering must yield to God’s narrative of life and suffering—to God’s grace narrative and grace math. Luther beautifully portrays the God-perspective that prompts healing. 

“If only a man could see his God in such a light of love . . . how happy, how calm, how safe he would be! He would then truly have a God from whom he would know with certainty that all his fortunes—whatever they might be—had come to him and were still coming to him under the guidance of God’s most gracious will.”

As you respond to your loss, are you struggling to believe that God has a good heart? Look to the Cross. The Cross forever settles all questions about God’s heart for us. The Christ of the Cross is the only One who makes sense of life when suffering bombards us.

Cropping Christ Into the Picture

Weaving is the next choice point you encounter on the road to hope. You can look at your losses with “eyeballs only”—with the world’s narrative and the world’s math. But in doing so, you’ll crop Christ out of the picture. And whenever you crop out Christ, you crop out hope. Despair and doubt then reign.

Or, approaching this fork in the road, you can crop Christ back into the picture. You can do some spiritual mathematics through grace narratives and grace math. With spiritual eyes you can trust God’s good heart. Jeremiah’s conviction (and consider all the suffering he endured) can become yours. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11).

Join the Conversation

How could you look at your suffering not with rose-colored glasses, but with faith eyes, with Cross-eyes, with 20/20 spiritual vision—grace narratives and grace math?