What do we do when life feels unfair?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: March 9-15
The Lord will be with me in my adversity.
I believe discipleship requires that we look at suffering with enough focus and care that we are moved with compassion to respond. Perhaps like Joseph we need to contemplate evil and suffering of the kind that makes us wonder where God is—or even if God is—because this is also the kind of suffering that brings us so low that we can’t help but look upward to God and then outward to God’s children. We can’t take on all human suffering as Christ did, but we are called to emulate him in suffering toward godliness.
—Jordan Watkins, “Suffering Towards Godliness”
A few years ago, I was at a low point. Daily I felt drained from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. Even showering felt like a monumental task—so big. So heavy. One day I switched a load of laundry in the basement and then lay down on the floor because it was too much effort to walk the half flight of stairs to the family room. Sitting upright at the table for a meal was sometimes too much. There was no relief in sight, and I had no idea how I could be a mother and wife, let alone a fulfilled human being in this body that was absolutely void of vitality. I had nothing.
My sense of spiritual connection was also at an all-time low. The gospel message was “turn to Jesus. He will not forsake you.” But the invitation seemed suddenly inane, nonsensical. I felt forsaken. Utterly abandoned and forgotten by God. The chasm between what God offered and what I believed Him to be capable of offering was entirely too wide, and I found myself stranded in the gap. My arms stretched wide between two truths—the attentive God I trusted, and the absent God I experienced.
There in the dry, parched no-man’s-land was my wrestle. I was Jacob, wrestling with the messenger and crying, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (Gen. 32:26). I was Sarah, abandoned between promises of a numberless posterity and the reality of an empty womb (Gen. 17:16).
And time stretched on. So much time.
…
One day—I can point to the exact place I stood in my bedroom, next to my Great-Grandma Esther’s hand-me-down jewelry box—I was pondering some scriptural examples of unflinching faith, including the biblical Esther, who declared, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). There were also Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, who knew that God had the ability to deliver them from the fiery furnace, but also knew that if He didn’t, they would remain faithful (Dan. 3:17–18); and Mary, who with absolute sub- mission said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).
And I asked myself, if I got to the point where I simply could not find the divine communion and spiritual healing I sought, what would I do? Would I give up on the Lord? Would I turn elsewhere?
Almost as I thought this, in a holy, perhaps mystical experience which I can only call gracing, I knew that I would never turn my back on the Lord. It was simultaneously a decision, a feeling, a direction, and a command. It was also a scripture and a hymn:
Even if I live my whole life and never find the peace I seek, I will not give up on the Lord. I will wait upon Him however long it takes.
On the surface, these words barely touch the significance of the experience for me; I admit they seem wholly unextraordinary. But the experience itself was fire. It was unclear what part of this lightning bolt stemmed from me and what part from God. In some ways, its intensity convinced me that it could not have emerged from my weak self, which was entirely too fickle and frail for such bold declarations. But in another sense, this conviction seemed to stem from the most authentic part of myself— the spiritual core that knew God intimately, even through veiled vision.
But also, in a strange inexplicable way, the demarcation between me and God seemed irrelevant. In communion with God, we were one and the same—indistinguishable. It was a duet, a dance, a covenant: a gift given and a gift received, a promise made and a promise trusted. It wasn’t submission; it was collaboration and union.
After the long wrestle, like Jacob, I had prevailed (Gen. 32:28). Like Sarah, I laughed (Gen. 18:12). I had been given power from God and all was new.
—Hannah Packard Crowther, “Gracing”
Our Heavenly Parents can consecrate suffering they do not cause or condone. Thus, while we are never meant needlessly to remain party to suffering, yet we can always trust that God will raise a phoenix, even from our darkest ashes. That light will make its way into and finally illuminate even what may initially seem to be the loneliest, scariest, and seemingly most impenetrable darkness.
God is light; and light finds a way.
In the meantime, we are not meant to construct a world where suffering ceases so much as we are meant to transform suffering forever into love.
—Tyler Johnson, “This Is Grace”
If I am faithful, the Lord will guide and inspire me.
How have faith and trust evolved overtime throughout Christianity? Yale professor Teresa Morgan and Zachary Davis explore this in a recent interview:
There was also a lot of interesting discussion about whether you could trust the gods. The world into which Christianity was born was a world, as far as we can tell, with very few atheists. Almost everybody just took for granted that the gods existed—the gods of Olympus, all the gods of the ancient world—but there was a lot of debate about whether you could trust them. They were often not trustworthy, and that’s one of the big differences between mainstream polytheism and Judaism and Christianity: for Jews and Christians, God is absolutely trustworthy, and that’s a huge new thing in that world.
With the Lord’s help, I can flee temptation.
How might we think about sin and temptation? In this conversation, Elizabeth Oldfield explores the concept of sin through examining the seven deadly sins. She asks, What can envy teach us about having a stable sense of self, especially in this age of social media? Is acedia, or sloth, really about attention? How can we continually recall our attention to the things we hope will shape our souls? Elizabeth demonstrates that at the end of the day, the seven deadly sins aren’t a legalistic list of ways to be in debt to God, but a loving guide for how to be in right relationship with the people around us.
The Lord will help me prepare for possible hardships.
I can be kind to my family.
Just like the lost sheep in a field and the son that finds himself in a muddy pigsty, the coin is lying somewhere on the woman’s dirt floor. Not because the coin is worthless, but because that’s where life sometimes drops precious things. But coins have intrinsic worth, and losing sight of them somewhere on the messy floors of life does not change their value. Parents, families, and even religious communities can all feel that they have lost someone who transitions to a different gender or identifies in a way that challenges their prior assumptions. Christlike love, for me, started to look a lot less like certainty and a lot more like getting on my knees in the dirt with my hands outstretched, feeling for what I could not yet see. This time and effort in search have a message underneath the actions: You are known, and you are worth this care.
—Candace Bithell, “Glowsticks and Parables”
My life is richer because of good friends. Friendship is a relationship that asks for renewal, but which also renews. And even if time, distance, and circumstances weaken bonds, I still believe there is something that lasts, something that leaves its residue on my soul, something pulling at a subatomic level to remind me of the times I have purely given and received love from members of God’s family whom I have, at various times of my life, called the blessed name of friend. And not only to remind me, but to find ways to bring heaven now, wanting all of us linked together.
—Megan Armknecht, “Heaven of Friends”