Being a Good Steward of Pain

God uses everything in our lives for his purposes if we are committed to following him. God wastes nothing, our successes, our failures, our mistakes, messes, and even our stupidity. God is a master-weaver who takes every thread of our lives and weaves it into something beautiful.

We sometimes do things right. We sometimes listen to God and follow his path, but other times we don’t listen and head down the wrong road. We look back with regret and are ashamed of our choices and our behavior. However, God uses it all!

For example, when Sarah saw Ismael making fun of her 3-year-old son Isaac, she insisted that Hagar and Ismael be sent away. Sarah did not act right! She was rude and indifferent, but she loved God. God did not abandon Sarah for her mess up. God saw that the situation distressed Abraham, and he said: “It’s alright Abraham, I will take care of Hagar and Ismael.”

This whole mess is the result of Abraham and Sarah’s lack of faith, and it brought him much distress. God, however, graciously worked in his confusion to make sense out of it. God weaves all the colors of our heartaches into something beautiful. God overrules our mistakes, sins, disobedience, and messes to create his own plan, and it is always beautiful.

Affliction is necessary for our lives to experience depth. David said that before he was afflicted, he went astray (Ps 119:67). Without hardship and trials, our lives would be superficial and without the depth of substance. God works with us in those trials to help us grow and mature.

Frederick Buechner writes:

We believe in God—such as it is, we have faith—faith—because certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost. The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God too.^[i]

Buechner talks about being a good steward of our pain, and if we are, God will use us in ways that affect others’ lives in profound ways. Many people run from pain. Some try to forget it by repressing their bad memories. Others blame their suffering on someone else. Some take the victim mentality. Still, others become embittered by their pain. God wants us to see our powerlessness and at the same time, see his power. When that happens, God can use us in marvelous ways, even in times of suffering.

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[i] Buechner, Frederick. Telling Secrets (pp. 35-36). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Breaking Old Habits

Repetitive habits are hard to break. Trying to undo a dominant, negative pattern that often has its roots in early childhood is extremely difficult to change. These bad habits wreak havoc in marriages and families. Deadly practices such as lying, uncontrolled anger, jealousy, envy, or playing the victim inflict harm and invalidate our Christian testimony. A practical approach to change is to concentrate our energies on building new healthy patterns that will become stronger than the old ones. If every time a person has an episode with his lying problem, for example, he learns to take responsibility for his actions by apologizing and acknowledging what he has done. In so doing, he will be changing slowly, and as time goes on, he will resist the urge to lie.

Abraham, who is a model of faith and integrity, had a problem of lying. Scripture records two different occasions where he lied, bringing shame to himself, his family, and to God. What is it that causes us to resort to deception, such as lying, so that we mislead people? Abraham said it was fear that caused him to lie. These dysfunctional habits often spring up when we feel insecure or threatened. They sometimes stem from our earliest years and are part of our cognitive schemas. Once the start button is pushed, the dysfunctional habit takes over. It will repeat itself over and over unless we have an intervention and learn to change this kind of irrational thinking and behavior.

The Apostle Paul writes about changing old habits into new healthy habits: “You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.  Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:7-10).

Paul’s words strike me, “you must rid yourselves of all such things.” It is up to us to recognize the bad habit that needs to be changed and to change it. The Apostle tells us to clothe ourselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience” (Col 3:12).

Once, we had to do some hard work of digging trenches on the basement walls of our church and painting a sealer on them to waterproof them. It was hard back-breaking work on a hot summer day. When I got home that day, my clothes were filthy, stained, and ruined. I threw them in the trash, got cleaned up, and put on clean clothes. That is a picture of what Paul is talking about to the Colossians.

Do we think this work of changing our old ways is going to be easy? If we ever thought that, we were mistaken. It’s hard! We must despise old habits and recognize them and not run from them. We cannot deflect blame for our mistakes on someone else. We must take responsibility for them! In so doing, we will be able to dress in a new wardrobe. What beautiful garments are described for us here: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Once we have these garments, we will be able to bear with one another and forgive each other. In so doing, we will be living out the command of Jesus to love one another (Col 3:13-14).