A couple weeks ago we had a guest speaker at church who gave a really honest sermon on pain and suffering and disappointment. Instead of a sugar sweet happy ending, this speaker said in effect, “Sometimes we do give our all to God in His service and sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way we plan. But, I still know who God is and I still trust him.” In the past when I’ve heard these sermons they tend to be the type that lays out all the pain and suffering and how God has delivered that person from the trials and tribulations of life and now everything is happy all the time. I usually walk away from those types of sermons cynically asking, “Well, what if God didn’t heal you?” or “What if your marriage did in fact end in divorce?” Would you be praising God the same way you are now? It was refreshing to hear someway honestly say, “Yeah, I’ve had questions and I’ve walked away from God, but by His grace, I’m still trusting Him today.”
Today, I happened to read an interview with Steven Curtis Chapman on the death of his daughter and how his family has healed after this tragedy. I’ve never been a big Chapman fan, because he always seems to paint a rosy-colored picture of Christianity in his music. This interview seemed to capture a more honest, and sometimes even darker, side of Chapman. The events in life that shake our faith to the core always seem to require some wrestling with the deep and a perseverance to keep wrestling and keep holding on long after we’ve given up hope.
Two things struck me about Chapman’s struggle that seem to answer for me how we continue to live in the face of grief and deep disappointment. One, Chapman over and over repeated Truth to himself. When he couldn’t find the Truth in himself, he went to trusted mentors and counselors and said, Is this really true? Can I really trust God? In spite of doubt and questions, Chapman chose to believe what was True and Real.
But, more than that Chapman also came to realization that even asking the questions and recognizing when we are about to fall into those dark place of doubt is grace.
At the hospital at Vanderbilt, literally within an hour of knowing that my little girl was in heaven with Jesus, I found myself having to make a choice, when I would start to feel myself and everything in me being sucked into this place, this abyss. I would begin to say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord. You give. You take away. But, God, I trust you. I trust you. You are faithful. You are good. I trust you. I trust you.” And as I would say that, literally just choose to make that declaration in the midst of this, I would almost physically feel myself being pulled back from that place. And I’d start to breathe again.
But it wouldn’t be long before I would go, “But, God, what? How could this happen? How are we ever going to survive?” And it’s like here I go back into that black, dark place.
But there was a grace to even recognize that you were falling into that place.
Yes. That is the grace and the gift of God to be able, in that process, to make that choice. That’s the crazy theology of all that—to even be able to make that choice to say, “God, I trust you,” that is a gift of grace.
