Are you single at 30? Have you lost the love of your life to cancer? Are you living in an apartment after ten years of marriage, when you thought for sure you would have a home? After being married several years, are you without a child of your own and struggling with infertility? Often in life, we experience disappointment and unexpected heartache. God desires for us to be surrendered to His will even, or should I say, especially, when life does not go the way we thought, hoped or dreamed.
“My painful circumstances will not last one moment longer than God knows is necessary to achieve His eternal purposes in and through my life. (Nancy Leigh DeMoss).
When I first read this statement, I had just entered into the most difficult days of my life, up to that point, with the diagnosis of a rare degenerative disease that had invaded my husband’s body at the age of fifty-five. Just weeks after his diagnosis, he began to suffer with depression that lasted nine months. In the midst of the apparent darkness beginning to cover my life at that time, I struggled to believe that God could achieve any good in the circumstances in which I found myself.
In Priscilla Shirer’s book God Is Able she says, “The fact is, I have never had much trouble believing in the power of God when it was theoretical, when all the action of my faith required of me was saying “Amen” during a sermon. As long as the problem was somebody else’s, I could believe in God’s big ability with a big ole sense of gusto. When I am staring at my own dilemmas, trying to keep the hat of sanity on my own head, the seed of doubt surprises me by taking root and often blossoming into a whole forest of questions about His ability and/or willingness to take care of them. In the midst of these various challenges and struggles that come together to threaten my sense of security, stability, and balance, I’ve found my worst fears confirmed. I am insufficient, outmatched, and incapable of fixing everything. Sometimes, I don’t know how I am going to make it through the day.
When Mark and I began this journey, I struggled to see God in it. I doubted His love and His ability to work good in and through my situation. Mark would say to me, “You know Romans 8:28 is true, that all things work together for our good and God’s glory,” Overcome by our circumstances, I questioned how God could possibly bring about any good in allowing this disease to rob my husband of the life he once knew and us of the marriage relationship we once had? I, like Priscilla, believed as long as it was someone else’s problem, God was able to take care of them and provide what they needed. But, when the “problems” came my way, I doubted His ability! I could not see Him or find Him in the midst of my circumstances.
When Paul penned the words in Philippians 4:11-12, he was in prison. Nancy Leigh DeMoss, in her book Lies Women Believe, says, “The apostle Paul learned that he could rejoice and be content and fruitful in any circumstances because his joy and well-being were not dependent on his circumstances but on the steadfast love and faithfulness of God and the condition of his relationship with God. Paul understood that we may not be able to control our circumstances, but our circumstances don’t have to control us.”
In the beginning, my circumstances controlled me! Like many Christians, I had a false belief. I was suffering from wrong thinking. I believed that if I did “good” things for God, then I deserved “good” things from God. It was as if I felt God owed me something. I struggled to justify what was happening in my life. I found myself asking why, yet receiving no answer. I was angry with God for allowing these circumstances in my life. I fought against what He wanted to do. It wasn’t until I began to surrender and trust Him in the midst of my difficult circumstances that He began to change me from the inside out.
Nancy goes on to say, “The apostle Paul taught that suffering is an essential course in God’s curriculum for all believers. If we do not trust the heart and intentions of God, we will naturally resist the suffering.”
“We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22b).
I didn’t want to suffer; I liked my comfortable life. The problem was that my comfortable life was not transforming me to be like Christ.
“For you were called to this, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in His steps” (1 Peter 2:21 HCSB).
Over these many months, God has been patient with me, His child, as I have learned the value and blessing of total surrender, having come to embrace and accept that my Heavenly father knows what is best.
1 Peter 5:10 says, “The God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast” (NIV).
“True joy and peace are not found in the absence of pain but rather through the sanctifying, purifying sustaining presence of God in the midst of our pain” (Nancy Leigh DeMoss).
Mark and I have come to the place of surrendering to and thanking God for the circumstances He has allowed. Because of His presence, power and purpose in our lives, we can testify that El Shaddai, The Almighty, All-Sufficient One has sufficiently taken care of us and He is ENOUGH!
Blessings!
dianne