2/7/2019 0 Comments The Still, Small Voice God is good. God’s love for us in unconditional; he loves us immensely and with a love that we can’t conceive.
This is what we’ve always been told, isn’t it? That's what, in our best moments, we know is true, isn’t it? But what about the moments that are not our best moments? What about the moments when senseless tragedy strikes? When loved ones die? What about when we sit down and watch the news and see the terrible things happening in the world all around us? If you are anything like me, you’ve probably asked God and/or the people around you how these two things can both be true. How can it be true that there is a God who loves each of us unconditionally and who is always good but so much pain and destruction exists in the world? These are the questions we talked about on Wednesday night at our Edge session. I had a profound encounter with Jesus when I was in high school. I’ve talked before about the retreat I went on when I was a freshman and how the Lord met me there and opened my heart to Him and how transformational that was for me. But the thing about retreats and about encountering Jesus is that it changes you and it forces you to confront things in the world that had been blindly happening around you. When I came back to my high school after the retreat and I was so in love with Jesus and with that experience. Retreats give you this talk at the end called "Coming Down From the Mountain" and it's geared toward helping you reacclimate to the world you'd left. It, admittedly, didn't do me much good as I hadn't realized how much I'd changed over the course of three days. Naturally I wanted to tell everyone about it. I wanted people to go on a retreat too, I wanted people to know that God was real and that he was here, I wanted to share the inexplicable feeling of joy and love that filled my heart to bursting. Oddly enough, though, people didn’t want that. My friends didn’t want to go on a retreat, they didn’t really want to hear about what I’d experienced there, and when they did listen they couldn’t understand the experience I had. It was where I learned a lesson that I would later hear echoed in the sentiments of St. Francis: “Preach the Gospel at all times and if necessary use words.” I lived with as much compassion, empathy, and integrity as I could muster and waited for openings to talk about my faith. High school, for me at least, was this place where all sorts of things could exist at the same time. I had friends who tried out different religions monthly (one month Buddhism, then Christianity, then Daoism, then Hinduism, then nothing in particular). It was the most interesting time in my life because people were so curious and so passionate about the things they were trying out. This was also exciting because those were the people who always wanted to talk about my faith, too. But the questions they always asked, were ones like “If God loves us then why do people suffer?” “If God loves us and listens to our prayers, then why are there people praying in Africa and still starving to death?” or (worst of all) “If there is a God, why would he let my dad die?” As a teenager, I didn’t have a good answer to these questions. I mean, sure, there’s the answer that we suffer as a natural consequence of sin; but then what about the people who are blatantly sinful but live lives of joy and prosperity? And how does that answer satisfy the question of people starving in third world countries and dying from diseases that we have vaccines for? How does that answer the question of my friend whose dad lost his battle to prostate cancer? Surely an entire country isn’t being punished by God because of sinfulness. Surely her father didn’t get prostate cancer because he sinned. It never felt like I had a good answer and honestly, the older I got, the harder it was to find them. The truth is that we live in a fallen world. We live in a world where we have free will and where other people have free will, but more than that I believe that Satan is very real and present here. I believe the Satan that destroyed everything around Job (that made him lose his family, lose his home, lose everything he had) is still here today. Can God stop him? Of course, God can do anything, He broke the power of sin and death over us and allows us to join the life of His Son. So why doesn’t he stop it? I believe that scripture holds the answer to this question as well, “The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God will live forever” (1John 2:17). “And He will wipe every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away (Revelation 21:4). The entire Chapter of Romans 8 expresses the same sentiment; the old things will pass away when we come to live with God. As Jedd expressed on Wednesday, the old things that have caused us so much pain here in this present moment will be gone. We are joined with Christ in His suffering when we suffer, and we will join Christ in life after death where suffering doesn't exist. There have been moments in my life that were so painful that I thought I would never get through them. There have been moments when my heart was so broken and battered that I wondered how it could ever beat again. There have been moments when I wondered how I was meant to go on, how I could possibly keep going. The thing about those moments, though, is that they were just that: moments. They were fleeting. They have faded away to the point that they might stir a vague sting in my heart when I think about them, but they aren’t crippling. How much truer will this be in heaven? I think of my 14-year-old self, so in love with Jesus. I think of how when I encountered Him all of my fears and worries, all of my feelings of inadequacy, all of my insecurities melted away to nothing. I think of the day to day now when the Holy Spirit enters my heart, all of those things are washed away and I am left with peace beyond the world, with a feeling of love so all-encompassing that the challenges and the stress fade to nothing. God is good and God is love. It’s like Elijah says, God was not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the storm but in the still, small voice. This week, I pray that you’ll find time to pause in the midst of your storms, floods, and fires, to hear the still, small voice speaking love to you. I pray that you will find the peace that transcends all earthly understanding and come that much closer to God and to heaven. Peace, Michaela
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