A friend of mine told me that the Wesley Owen Christian bookshop in town was closing down and so I got up early to go and look for bargains. I have so many books already, some half read, some unread, some with interesting titles, some that months ago seemed to speak into my life…I really didn’t need another book, but I bought one anyway.
“When Heaven Invades Earth – a practical guide to a life of miracles.” I bought it because I thought reading it would help me to catch up with where some of my friends are in terms of anticipating God showing up everywhere and doing miraculous things.
It’s not that I don’t think God does that – it’s just that I have had recent experience of God apparently not turning up and doing miraculous things.
It seems to me that, having read the first chapter of the book, that some of the miraculous things that God does are unimportant things. An account where someone had one leg an inch shorter than the other, and people pray and watch the short leg grow – a short leg is not life threatening. It is inconvenient, yes, but no one dies because one leg is an inch shorter than the other.
Why is God so interested in the length of a person’s leg, but apparently not interested in poison accumulating in another person’s abdomen, shutting down all the vital organs, pushing them down into further levels of intensive care until eventually the heart gives in? Why does He apparently does nothing to remove cancer tumours seeding and spreading and turning someone into a frame of thin bones with skin stretched over it, and then the lungs fill with fluid there’s one last sigh?
Job never knew why bad things happened to him. It was enough for him to know that God was speaking to him.
Just thinking about God speaking – what He is saying to me is that I think too highly of this life, as if it is the only life there is. There is a next life – an eternal life that follows. Just because those that I loved and lost this year are no longer living this earthly life, doesn’t mean that their lives have come to an end. They are just living the next episode somewhere that right now, today, I cannot be a part of.
The miracle – there was a miracle – has been in me. I have not surrendered my faith because the answer didn’t suit me. I haven’t walked away.
Job says it for me - “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” 13:15
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