God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting
Comfort: God Comes
Countdown to God’s Healing: I’m excited to announce that BMH Books will release my fifth book soon (in May 2010). 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: Comfort: God Comes.
Comfort: Moving from Depression to Receiving God’s Help
Facing suffering requires us to wrestle face-to-face with God. In candor we make the courageous decision to step on the mat. In complaint we grapple hand-to-hand with God about life. In cry we cry “Uncle.” We “tap out” and admit that life has pinned us and we desperately need God’s help. We’ve fallen and we can’t get up. What’s next?
High school and collegiate wrestling matches have three periods. If the score is tied at that point, you enter overtime. Consider comfort your intense, sudden-death, overtime period with God.
In cry, we ask for God’s help. In comfort, we receive God’s help. In comfort, the God we cry out to, comes. However, God does not necessarily come in the way that we might expect. For He comes to comfort us with His crippling touch that plants the seed for future healing.
For those who do not turn to Christ, the grief process moves from denial, to anger, to bargaining/works, and then to depression. For those who cling to Christ, for those who grieve with hope, the journey moves from candor, to complaint/lament, to crying out to God, and then to comfort.
Comfort: Surviving Scars
What is comfort? Originally, comfort meant co-fortitude—being fortified by the strength of another. Being en-couraged—having courage poured into you from an outside source. That outside source is Christ and the Body of Christ. In this life, your scar may not go away, but neither will His. He understands. He cares. He’s there.
Comfort experiences the presence of God in the presence of suffering—a presence that empowers me to survive scars and plants the seed of hope that I will yet thrive. I’m not necessarily thriving. More likely, I’m limping, but at least I’m no longer retreating.
A Biblical Comfort Sampler: Wrestling with God
Jacob’s wrestling match with God illustrates this process. Recall the context. Jacob is terrified that his brother Esau will kill him. In self-sufficiency, Jacob plans and plots ways to manipulate Esau into forgiving him.
Then, at night Jacob encounters God. He wrestles God throughout the night until God overpowers Jacob by dislocating his hip. In response, “Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘It is because I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared’” (Genesis 32:30). Jacob shows us that tenacious wrestling with God results in painful yet profitable comfort through communion.
As the sun rose, Jacob was limping. He looks up and there’s Esau. Jacob limps up to Esau and, with the pain of his dislocated hip, bows down to the ground seven times. Imagine the excruciating pain. Each time he bows down pain shoots through his crippled body. Then Jacob receives from Esau an embrace instead of a dagger. He faced his fear, still wounded and scarred, but surviving. God humbled Jacob, weakened him, and in the process strengthened him.
What is illustrated in Jacob’s life is taught in Asaph’s story. According to Psalm 73:21-28, suffering is an opportunity for God to divulge more of Himself and to release more of His strength. When Asaph’s heart was grieved, and his spirit embittered, God brought him to his senses. Listen to his prayer. “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26).
In grieving we say with Asaph, “My flesh may be scarred, my heart may be scared, but with God I can survive—forever.” Thus faith perceives that God feels our pain, joins us in our pain, and even shares our pain. In fact, faith believes that, “in all their distress he too was distressed” (Isaiah 63:9). His sharing of our sorrow makes our sorrow endurable.
Faith does not demand the removal of suffering; faith desires endurance in suffering, temptation, and persecution (1 Corinthians 10:13). Faith understands that what can’t be cured, can be endured. Faith delights in weakness, because when we are weak, then God is strong, and we are strong in Him (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). Grieving is a normal response to loss. However, God does not abandon us in our dark, dank casket. God, who is Light, shines His light of comfort into our hurting hearts.
On the Road to Hope
The grieving journey is filled with choice points, forks in the road. In stage one, we choose either denial or candor, in stage two either anger or complaint, in stage three either bargaining/works or crying out to God, and in stage four either depression or comfort.
As we wrestle face-to-face with God in our suffering, we experience God’s crippling touch. As the great Soul Physician, where He touches; He heals. Are you opening yourself to the God of all comfort?
Join the Conversation
What is your suffering teaching you about God’s power made perfect in your weakness?
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